X Corp has sent cease and desist letters to Nitter and the related XCancel service, accusing them of data scraping and violating its rules, forcing both to halt operations. The move shuts down a long-running open source tool that let users read X posts without an account, no JavaScript, no ads and no IP tracking, and highlights tension between Elon Musk's stated free speech views and X's own legal action against a privacy-focused project.

Nitter's maintainer, known as zedeus, confirmed nitter.net is offline and development has stopped while they seek legal advice, and the GitHub repository has been archived. XCancel's homepage says it received the letter on Monday 24 August at 8pm EST and has paused the service "until further notice." This is not Nitter's first clash with X: it briefly shut down in January 2024 after Twitter removed guest account access, before returning roughly a year later using a workaround, which appears to have prompted this latest legal response. X has not responded to a request for comment, and it joins other firms such as Meta, which sued web scraper Bright Data in 2023, in cracking down on unauthorised data access.