X shuts down seven-year-old Nitter with cease-and-desist letters
What's the deal? X Corp has sent cease-and-desist letters to NitterDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the open-source project that let people read X posts without an account. Nitter.net is offline, development has stopped, and its creator says he is seeking legal advice.
Why now? The letters arrived on August 24, according to a message on Nitter's site, and gave the project until 5pm EST on August 25 to shut down. XCancel, the best-known site built on Nitter, has also halted operations.
What the letters demand: They call for a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository, which has lived on GitHub since 2019. The developer, who goes by the handle Zedeus, told TechCrunchDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → that other instances received similar letters.
The legal basis: The letter accuses Nitter of the "unlawful use and circumvention of X's Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data," saying X has evidence it scraped data and accessed accounts and session tokens. X's lawyers cite the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute.
What Nitter did: It fetched public posts and stripped out ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript, giving readers a clean page without an account or app. It was never a full replacement: no home feed, no notifications, and no way to post.
Forums that ban direct X links, often as a protest against owner Elon Musk, leaned on Nitter and XCancel heavily. Bluesky has been building for the same audience.
This has happened before: In February 2024, X closed several methods Nitter used to reach posts, and the flagship instance went dark. Hosts then attached instances to real X accounts, development resumed, and the service relaunched in 2025. This time X is using lawyers rather than technical restrictions.
The signal: X is far from alone. Meta has taken numerous scrapers to court, and most large social networks now restrict third-party readers, pushing users into official apps where they can be tracked and served personalised ads. The fight is less about one project than about who controls access to public posts — and X wants readers logged in.
Read more: thenextweb.com, TechCrunch, forbes.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
