X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters on Aug. 24 to the open-source project Nitter and the frontend service XCancel, ordering them to shut down permanently, remove the GitHub codebase, and confirm compliance in writing within three business days. Nitter maintainer zedeus then took nitter.net offline and said development had been paused.
Nitter and XCancel went offline within two days
According to the source material, zedeus posted a notice on nitter.net the day after receiving the letter, saying the site had been taken offline and development was on hold. He also said he was seeking legal advice. Later the same day, XCancel, described in the input as the most widely used Nitter frontend, received the same letter and announced that it was stopping service.
Nitter was built to fetch public posts from X while stripping out ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript, allowing people to read posts without an account and without opening the app. The project started in June 2019 and had been running for seven years by the time it was shut down.
X laid out five demands
After zedeus posted the letter on Hacker News, the contents became public. The company’s demands covered five points:
- Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X data"
- Stop using the Twitter and X trademarks
- Stop all access to X data, including any copies already stored
- Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
- Provide written confirmation within three business days
The letter said X had written evidence showing that the operator was scraping X data, bypassing API access controls and rate limits, using X accounts and session tokens to access the platform, and republishing X data publicly.
X cited Nitter’s own documentation
One of the more notable parts of the letter was X’s use of Nitter’s own documentation as evidence. The lawyers quoted Nitter’s description of itself, saying it used "Twitter’s unofficial API," that all requests passed through the operator’s server, and that a real X account was required for the service to function.
The source ties that accusation to changes made in January 2024, when X stopped issuing guest accounts. That cut off the method Nitter had used to fetch data, and the project declared itself dead the following month. In early 2025, the community revived it by merging several pull requests and switching to session tokens, which required each instance operator to log in with a real X account. The input says that setup violated X’s service agreement.
Legal claims cited terms, Texas law, and the Lanham Act
The source says X based its claims on three sets of legal grounds: alleged violations of its terms of service, developer agreement, and developer policy; the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act; and the federal trademark law known as the Lanham Act. The letter also threatened legal action against zedeus personally.
X further said that the same notice had been sent to GitHub and to the maintainer’s domain registrar.
The repository was archived rather than deleted
Instead of deleting the repository outright, zedeus archived it. As of Aug. 27, the zedeus/nitter repository was still available on GitHub but had been switched to read-only status. The input lists the repository at 13,594 stars and 1,065 forks, with an AGPL-3.0 license.
The source also notes that the code had already been copied to more than a thousand places, making any order to "delete the repository" difficult to carry out in technical terms.
Most public instances had already disappeared
Cleanup at the instance level moved quickly. Citing Forbes, the input says that by Wednesday morning, nearly all major Nitter instances had gone offline, with only one instance hosted in Singapore still running.
For people who used Nitter to read X without logging in, the effect was immediate. A common workaround had been to replace an x.com link with xcancel.com to view an entire conversation thread. The source says that path stopped working after Monday.
Projects and bots that depended on Nitter were also hit
The fallout was not limited to individual readers. The input says there were 3,983 GitHub projects matching the keyword nitter, and many bots, notification services, and scraping scripts pointed directly to public instances. Once those endpoints stopped responding, those tools could break without any code changes.
Replacement tools appeared quickly. A no-login viewer called Twitter Viewer reached Hacker News on Aug. 26 and received 434 points, according to the source. In the source’s framing, demand for this type of service was picked up almost immediately after Nitter went down.