Privacy-focused X viewers Nitter and XCancel shut down following legal pressure
The open-source projects have ceased operations after receiving cease-and-desist letters from X regarding API usage.
Quick Look
- Privacy-friendly services Nitter and XCancel have officially shut down after X issued cease-and-desist letters, citing unlawful data scraping and API circumvention.
- The services previously allowed users to view X content without accounts or tracking.
AI-generated summary
Why It Matters
Nitter was an open-source project that allowed users to view X posts without logging in or being tracked. X has previously moved to restrict third-party access to its platform to prioritize its own ad-supported interface.
After X threatened legal action last month, Nitter and XCancel, privacy-friendly services for viewing X posts, appear to be officially dead — for real this time.
Nitter, an open-source project that let people read X posts without logging in, had been used to power a number of services, like XCancel and others. But last month, X sent Nitter a cease-and-desist letter over its alleged “unlawful use and circumvention” of X’s API and associated data.
Essentially, X said that Nitter had scraped the social network’s data to access accounts and session tokens in violation of its rules.
Despite the threat, Nitter said on its GitHub page that “following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue,” and promised more details would come soon. In early September, both Nitter and XCancel were up and running again after a short pause.
Unfortunately, things have since changed.
Nitter’s GitHub page was archived on Friday, September 11, indicating it’s now in read-only status and can no longer be modified or updated. XCancel, meanwhile, shut its service down on Monday, and published a new message on its home page: “Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings we are required to suspend this service again until further notice.”
Nitter, which worked by fetching public X posts and then stripping out the ads, tracking cookies and JavaScript, gave people a clean, clutter-free way to read posts without an account or the social network’s app.
For X, however, this is not ideal, as it doesn’t want people to access its content without being able to monetize those views with ads. That’s also why Twitter had disallowed third-party apps from accessing its content years ago, wiping out popular services like Twitterific and Tweetbot along the way.
This wasn’t X’s first attempt to shut down Nitter, but it seems to have worked. Back in 2024, Nitter’s main instance, Nitter.net, temporarily went offline after X rolled out new API restrictions. After that crackdown, those who wanted to host a Nitter instance had to connect it to a real X account.
For lurkers, the services’ closures are a bummer, as they had offered a way to view what was happening on X without having to actually participate on X or help it boost its user numbers.
Nitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Open Questions
- Will X pursue further legal action against individual instance hosts?
