// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
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:
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.
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.
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.