Seven years of work on a project that let people read X posts without an account came to an end on a legal clock: X Corp. gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EST on August 25 to pull down its instances and its code repository.
All that’s left at Nitter’s address now is a brief notice. Nitter.net has gone dark, development has halted, and the developer behind the project is consulting lawyers rather than shipping commits.
What Nitter actually did, and why X wanted it gone
The idea behind it fit in a single sentence. Nitter pulled in public X posts and stripped away the ads, the tracking cookies and the JavaScript, leaving a clean way to read posts without an account or an app.
Anyone who has tapped an X link on a phone and run straight into a login wall knows the appeal. Nitter was the version of that link that simply loaded.
Nor was this a single website. The project also served as the engine behind a number of other front ends — XCancel among them — that let people view X posts directly.
Texas law and the Lanham Act both show up in the letter
Here is the message now posted on Nitter’s website:
“On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.
nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I’m seeking legal advice and won’t be commenting further on the specifics for now.
Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.”
In the letter, X accuses the project of an “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” and claims it holds evidence that Nitter scraped X data and reached X accounts and session tokens in breach of X’s rules.
According to X’s lawyers, that conduct runs afoul of “various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).”
Pairing a trademark statute with a computer-access statute is telling: X isn’t making a case about data alone. It’s also objecting to the X name appearing on a site X has nothing to do with.
2024 was a technical squeeze. This isn’t.
This isn’t X’s first attempt, though the tooling was different last time. Back in 2024, new API restrictions from X temporarily knocked Nitter.net, the project’s flagship instance, offline.
From then on, per the project’s GitHub page, anybody wanting to run a Nitter instance had to tie it to a genuine X account. Even with those constraints, development resumed and instances returned.
That contrast is the point. An API change is something you can engineer your way around. A cease-and-desist letter pointed at your repository doesn’t have a patch.
The letters also went out more widely than one address. Zedeus, Nitter’s developer, told me by email that other Nitter instances had received similar letters.
Every major platform is running this same play
X is hardly alone in this. Meta has hauled numerous scrapers into court, and most of the bigger social networks now block third-party readers as a matter of policy.
Wherever you look, the destination is identical: sign in, use the official app, get tracked and served personalized ads. Third-party readers snap that chain, which is exactly why platforms object to them.
Lurkers are the ones who come out worst. If you kept up with a few accounts through a Nitter instance and never bothered to register, that workaround has disappeared — and the substitute X is presumably betting you’ll accept is an account and a login.
It’s worth being exact about where things stand right now: nitter.net is down, development has stopped for the time being, and the developer says he won’t be commenting further on the specifics. If some smaller instance you depend on is still running, assume it’s living on borrowed time and start tracking down the accounts you genuinely read.