Nitter Continues Despite X Corp’s Cease-and-Desist
Two weeks after X Corp’s lawyers demanded it disappear, Nitter says it will continue, following legal advice it has not described. TNW found XCancel serving pages and the GitHub repository unarchived. The flagship instance remains dark, and X has said nothing.
September 8, 2026 – 12:25 am
Elon Musk at VIVA Technology (VivaTech) in Paris, France on June 16, 2023.
Credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock
Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. This instance and others will be back up and running shortly.
The notice appears on nitter.net, with the old cease-and-desist banner struck through.
The maintainer, using the handle zedeus, promised a fuller announcement within a week.
Reversal and Current Status
As reported by The Register, the reversal is already visible.
- XCancel, the most well-known public instance built on Nitter’s code, was serving pages again on Monday and remained accessible on Tuesday.
- The GitHub repository has also been unarchived and is publicly accessible again, with no archive notice.
The main nitter.net instance has not yet resumed normal service, leaving the overall situation mixed.
The Letters and Their Impact
X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters on August 24, demanding the permanent removal of Nitter instances and the project’s repository. Initially, these requests were effective:
- Instances went dark.
- The repository froze.
- Nitter went offline after seven years.
Nitter: A Brief Overview
Nitter is a front end for reading posts on X, requiring no account, running no JavaScript, and carrying no advertising. Every request goes through its own backend, so X never sees the reader’s address or browser fingerprint.
It republishes no private material and competes for no advertising. Nitter strips the tracking and the account requirement from public posts, which are the parts X monetizes.
Legal Shift and Nitter’s Resilience
The project has never been a stable target, relying on an unofficial API that X keeps changing. Instance operators, not the maintainer, bear the cost of these updates.
The legal weather around scraping has shifted, potentially encouraging Nitter’s continued existence. In July, a U.S. court dismissed Google’s DMCA claims against SerpApi, a company built on scraping Google’s own results. This ruling suggests that reading public pages is not automatically infringement or circumvention.