Nitter is offline after seven years, shut down by cease-and-desist letters

X Corp has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open-source project that let people read X posts without an account. Nitter.net is offline and development has stopped. Its creator says he is seeking legal advice. XCancel, the best-known site built on Nitter, has also stopped operating.

Sarah Perez has read one of the letters and reported it for TechCrunch. X gave Nitter until 5pm Eastern on 25 August to shut down.

What the letters demand

The message now on Nitter’s site says the letters arrived on 24 August. They demand a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and of the project’s repository. The developer, who goes by the handle Zedeus, wrote that he will not comment on the specifics for now. He thanked everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.

He told TechCrunch by email that other Nitter instances had received similar letters. A version of the same notice sits on the project’s GitHub page, where the code has lived since 2019.

XCancel posted its own message about receiving a letter from X Corp, and said it is stopping operations until further notice. It was the most widely shared of the sites that ran on Nitter.

The legal basis X is using

The letter accuses Nitter of the “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data”, according to TechCrunch. X says it holds evidence that Nitter scraped its data and reached X accounts and session tokens in breach of its rules.

The company’s lawyers cite the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute. They add that the list is not exhaustive. Musk and X have not commented publicly on the shutdowns.

What Nitter actually did

Nitter described itself as an alternative Twitter front end focused on privacy and performance. It fetched public posts and stripped out the ads, tracking cookies and JavaScript. Readers got a clean page without an account or the app.

It was never a full replacement. There was no home feed, no infinite scrolling and no notifications. Nobody could post either, because there was no way to log in.

Forums and communities that ban direct links to X leaned on it heavily, often as a protest against the platform’s owner. Most of those places allowed Nitter and XCancel links instead, which let people read a post without visiting X. Bluesky has been building for the same audience.

This has happened before

Nitter went dark once already. In February 2024, X closed several of the methods the project used to reach posts, including a guest account feature. The flagship instance stopped working.

Hosts then had to attach their instances to a real X account. Development picked up again anyway, the service relaunched in 2025, and instances came back online. This time X is using lawyers rather than technical restrictions. Its product organisation has also thinned out, and head of product Nikita Bier left the company this month.

Some instances are still up

Nitter is open source, so shutting the flagship down does not shut down everything. Siladitya Ray reported for Forbes that nearly all the popular instances were down by Wednesday morning, with one exception hosted in Singapore.

Mike Pearl noted at Gizmodo that a Reddit user reported some maintainers still trying to keep other instances running, and suggested operators outside the United States may be harder to reach with an American cease-and-desist. Neither claim has been confirmed by the maintainers themselves.

Scraping fights are not unusual

TechCrunch points out that X is far from alone here. Meta has taken numerous scrapers to court. Most large social networks now restrict third-party readers, which pushes people into the official app, where the platform can track them and serve personalised ads.

Who owns scraped material is being fought over on several fronts at once. A leak last year showed how Suno built its AI music on millions of scraped songs.

A US court took the other view in July. It dismissed Google’s scraping claim against SerpApi, in a case about who may collect data from a platform that built itself by collecting data.

What it means in Europe

The letter leans on Texas state law and a US federal trademark statute. Neither reaches a server in the European Union, and an operator hosting an instance in Europe does not obviously fall under either.

Two European rules do apply. The Digital Services Act requires very large platforms to give vetted researchers access to data, and the Digital Markets Act covers interoperability for designated gatekeepers. X has faced Commission proceedings on other grounds, though no European regulator has commented on this takedown. The Justice Department recently backed Musk’s xAI against a state law in Minnesota.

The practical effect is the same either way. European readers who avoided X while still reading it have lost the route they were using, and the alternatives now require either an account or a working instance somewhere outside American jurisdiction.

What to watch

Zedeus has not said whether he will contest the letters. X has not said whether it will go further than sending them. The repository was still reachable on Wednesday, and the takedown demand covers it.

The Singapore instance is the test of whether an American cease-and-desist can close an open-source project hosted everywhere. Anyone can fork the code, and X would have to send letters to each new host.

The deadline in the letter has already passed. Nitter met it, and the project’s seven-year run ended without X saying anything in public.