Overview
- X sent legal letters demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter’s code and live instances, and the project’s main site and repository were taken offline while the maintainer seeks counsel.
- The cease-and-desist, which cited state and federal statutes including the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, accuses Nitter of scraping X data and using session tokens to circumvent the platform’s API.
- Nitter’s flagship instance nitter.net was made unavailable, the GitHub repository was archived and set to read-only, and XCancel — a service that relied on Nitter — paused operations after receiving similar notices.
- Some third-party maintainers outside the United States have signaled they may try to keep other instances running, a move that could shift hosting and operations to jurisdictions harder for X to enforce against.
- The dispute continues a post-2024 pattern in which X tightened API access and moved from technical blocks to legal action, raising questions about who can lawfully provide privacy-preserving views of public social posts and how resilient open-source projects can be.