X Sends Cease-and-Desist Letters, Nitter and XCancel Go Dark After Seven Years

X Corp shut down a seven-year-old open-source project this week with a legal letter instead of a lawsuit.

Nitter, a free front-end that let people read public X posts without an account or the official app, went offline Tuesday after its developer received a cease-and-desist letter from X. XCancel, a popular site built on Nitter's code, got the same letter and shut down too, according to TechCrunch, which reviewed the letters.

What X Is Claiming

The letters, sent August 24, 2026, accuse Nitter of "unlawful use and circumvention" of X's API and associated data, per TechCrunch. X's lawyers say they have evidence Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X's rules.

X cited the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the federal Lanham Act, the trademark statute, according to TechCrunch and Open Source For You. Pairing a data-access statute with a trademark law signals X isn't just angry about scraping. It's also objecting to sites using the X name and mirroring its content without permission.

X gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EDT on August 25 to comply. It did. The developer, who goes by Zedeus, posted a short notice on Nitter's site: "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."

Zedeus told TechCrunch that other Nitter instances received similar letters. As of Tuesday, nearly every popular Nitter instance was down, according to Forbes, except for one hosted in Singapore.

What Nitter Actually Did

Nitter pulled public X posts and stripped out ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript, giving users a clean way to read tweets without logging in, according to eGamers.io and multiple other outlets. There was no home feed, no notifications, no posting. It was read-only.

That made it popular on forums and communities that ban direct X links, often as a protest against owner Elon Musk, Forbes reported. Those same communities typically allowed Nitter and XCancel links instead, letting users see a post's content without technically visiting X.

This isn't the first time X tried to kill Nitter. In 2024, X changed its API and guest-account access, knocking Nitter's flagship instance offline temporarily, according to TechCrunch and AlternativeTo. After that, anyone hosting a Nitter instance had to connect it to a real X account, per the project's GitHub page. Nitter adapted and came back.

A legal cease-and-desist is a different problem. As eGamers.io put it, an API change is something you can engineer around. A takedown letter aimed at your code repository isn't.

The Case Against X's Move

Nitter's developer didn't stay quiet about his view of the situation. In a post on his own site, Zedeus called X's action "not surprising but very stupid," arguing that companies like X and Meta scrape the open web at massive scale without permission but have "zero tolerance" for individuals doing the same to them. His point: the objection isn't really about protecting user content, it's about control, since neither X nor Instagram permits third-party readers because their business model depends on users interacting through official, trackable channels.

X built its platform in part on public content and open access norms that made Twitter useful for over a decade. A no-login, ad-free reader served a public interest by letting people fact-check links and read newsmaker posts without handing over data or attention to X's ad business.

The Case For X's Move

X's counterargument, as laid out in the letters TechCrunch reviewed, is that Nitter didn't just read public posts. It accessed X accounts and session tokens, according to X's lawyers, meaning it operated by working around authentication systems, not just pulling openly published text. If that's accurate, it's a materially different thing than a browser plugin that reformats a public webpage.

Every major platform has been moving this direction. Meta has sued scrapers repeatedly, and most large social networks now require login to view content specifically to control tracking and ad delivery, according to TechCrunch.

No court has ruled on X's claims. No lawsuit has been filed as of this writing. This is a cease-and-desist letter, a legal demand, not a judgment, and Nitter's team has not conceded the underlying allegations, only that they're seeking legal advice and complying with the shutdown request in the meantime.

What's Unresolved

X has not publicly commented on the shutdowns, per Forbes. It's unclear whether X intends to pursue further legal action, whether Nitter's developer will fight the claims, or whether a rebuilt instance might reappear under different technical terms, as happened after the 2024 dispute. The Singapore-based instance still running, per Forbes' reporting at publication time, raises the question of whether X's letters reached every operator or whether enforcement will be piecemeal going forward.