Elom Musk's X Tried to Kill Nitter. The Project Just Said It’s Coming Back

Nitter, the open source front-end for reading X posts without signing up for an account, is not going anywhere yet.

Weeks after X Corp's lawyers showed up demanding a permanent shutdown, the project's GitHub repository has come out of read-only mode with an updated README that says:

UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

Now, the repository and the homepage carry the same message, with the latter further stating that the flagship instance of Nitter and third-party-hosted ones will be back up soon.

A proper announcement is expected sometime within the next few days.

What X's letter did

On August 24, X Corp sent out cease and desist letters demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository. The deadline was 5 PM EST on August 25.

Nitter complied, and the repo was archived and marked as read-only. nitter.net's content was replaced by a short notice (which has since been updated), and a popular instance, XCancel, halted its operations.

TechCrunch, which obtained the letter, reports that X accuses Nitter of an "unlawful use and circumvention of X's Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data."

X alleges that it has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X's rules, citing the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act.

So far, X has not publicly commented on the shutdown or the reversal.

Not the first time

This is not the first time Nitter has been declared dead. In early 2024, X removed the guest account feature the project relied on, resulting in the project's lead, Zedeus, announcing the end.

The project found a workaround and returned sometime in 2025.

Nitter's inspiration, Invidious, a privacy-friendly YouTube front-end that has had its own run-in with big tech lawyers, faced a seven-day shutdown demand from YouTube in June 2023.

Fast forward to now. The project has kept going, and nothing came of the demand.

Makes you think such moves exist to strong-arm open source projects into submission rather than enforce rules. To these companies, any project is worth a lawsuit if there is even a shred of justification.

What remains is that Nitter says legal advice cleared it to continue, but not what that advice was or how instances will operate going forward. The announcement is where those answers come to us.

This could escalate

As far as I can see, X tried to choke such projects by closing the access they relied on back in 2024. It didn't work. Now, in 2026, they tried throwing the book by sending lawyers after them.

Seeing that X leadership has been quite disruptive, I have a feeling that they won't back down this easily, and things will escalate. When they do, I hope the open source community stands behind projects like Nitter.