Seven years of a project that let you read X posts without an account ended with a legal deadline: 5 p.m. EST on August 25. That’s the cutoff X Corp. gave Nitter to take down its instances and its code repository.
Nitter’s site is now a short notice and nothing else. Nitter.net is offline, development has stopped, and the developer behind it is talking to lawyers instead of pushing commits.
What Nitter did, and why X wanted it gone
The mechanics were simple enough to explain in a sentence. Nitter fetched public X posts, then stripped out the ads, tracking cookies and JavaScript, leaving a clean way to read posts with no account and no app.
If you’ve ever clicked an X link on a phone and hit a login wall, you understand the appeal. Nitter was the version of that link that just loaded.
It also wasn’t just one site. The project powered a number of other front ends, including XCancel, that let people view X posts directly.
The letter cites Texas law and the Lanham Act
The message on Nitter’s website reads:
“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.”
The letter itself accuses Nitter of an “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” and says X has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens against X’s rules.
Lawyers for X said the actions violate “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).”
That’s a trademark statute sitting next to a computer-access statute, which tells you X isn’t arguing only about data. It’s arguing about the X name showing up on a site X doesn’t run.
The 2024 crackdown was technical. This one isn’t.
X has been at this before, with different tools. In 2024, Nitter’s flagship instance, Nitter.net, went dark temporarily after X rolled out new API restrictions.
Anyone who wanted to host a Nitter instance after that had to connect it to a real X account, according to the project’s GitHub page. Restrictions and all, development picked back up and instances came back online.
That’s the difference worth noting. You can route around an API change. A cease-and-desist letter aimed at your repository is harder to patch.
And the letters weren’t limited to one target. Zedeus, the developer behind Nitter, told me by email that other Nitter instances received similar letters.
Every big platform is doing some version of this
X isn’t an outlier here. Meta has taken numerous scrapers to court, and most larger social networks now restrict third-party readers outright.
The end state is the same everywhere: you log in, you use the official app, you get tracked and shown personalized ads. Third-party readers break that chain, which is precisely the problem from the platform’s side.
The people who lose here are lurkers. If you followed a handful of accounts through a Nitter instance without ever making an account, that workaround is gone, and the replacement X is presumably hoping you’ll pick is an account and a login.
For now, the practical status is worth being precise about: 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 you were relying on a smaller instance that’s somehow still up, treat it as borrowed time and go find the accounts you actually read.
