Nitter let anyone read X posts without an X account, an app or an ad. On August 24, X Corp sent cease and desist letters. They demand a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and of the project's repository. Nitter.net is offline. XCancel has stopped. A day later, one public copy on the community status tracker was still up.
Nitter's developer, zedeus, replaced the homepage with a short notice. It says the site is offline and that development has stopped "for the time being." The developer is seeking legal advice and will not comment on the specifics for now. The Nitter code repository, with about 13,500 stars, is now archived and read only.
"Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years," the notice ends. Nitter started in June 2019. It opened public X profiles as plain pages, with none of X's ads, tracking cookies or JavaScript. The project clocked one profile at 60KB through Nitter and 784KB on twitter.com.
What the letter says
The letter accuses Nitter of the "unlawful use and circumvention" of X's programming interface and its data. X says it has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in breach of its rules. TechCrunch has seen the letter.
X's lawyers cite state and federal law and single out two acts. One is Texas's Harmful Access by Computer Act, a state law about computer access without the owner's consent. The other is the Lanham Act, which covers trademarks. Nitter had until 5PM Eastern on August 25 to shut down.
None of that has been tested. X has not sued Nitter, and no court has ruled on these claims. Nitter's developer is taking advice before saying more.
X sends cease-and-desist to open source project Nitter over alleged scraping
XCancel got one too
XCancel is the one other site TechCrunch names. It posted its own notice too. A letter from X Corp came in on Monday, August 24 at 8PM Eastern, "asking to cease and desist the service XCancel." The site says it "is stopped until further notice." The homepage and the profile pages now show that line instead of posts.
What is left
A community tracker lists eight public Nitter sites. Seven are down, nitter.net and xcancel.com among them. One was still marked healthy on August 25, nitter.catsarch.com.
Nitter also turned public X profiles into RSS feeds. That is how news readers and alerting tools followed an account without holding one. The feeds those two sites served are gone with them.
Anyone can still fork the code and run a private copy. That got awkward in 2024. Once X shut off the temporary guest credentials Nitter relied on, running a copy meant feeding it sessions from a real X account and accepting that the account can be banned. Those letters also demand that the repository come down.
Nitter instance health tracker
It died once before
In January 2024, X shut off creation of the temporary guest credentials Nitter ran on, leaving the existing ones to expire. Its developer wrote "Nitter is dead." on the issue tracker on January 27. The flagship site was back in February 2025.
A technical block invites a workaround, and the people running instances found one. A lawyer's letter invites a lawyer, and development has stopped while zedeus finds one.
