X Corp. Shuts Down Nitter: The Project Receives a Cease and Desist Notice

The free Nitter project, which for many years served as an alternative interface for Twitter (now X), is ceasing to exist. On August 24, 2026, X Corp. sent out cease and desist letters demanding an end to the infringement and insisting on the permanent shutdown of both the public Nitter instances and the project's repository itself. Two days later, on August 26, the owner switched the repository on GitHub to archive mode — it is now read-only. At the same time, the related XCancel redirect service stopped working as well.

What Nitter Is

Nitter was a free and open-source frontend for Twitter, built with an emphasis on privacy and speed. The authors borrowed the idea from the Invidious project, which plays an analogous role for YouTube. The key feature was that the user's browser never contacted Twitter's servers directly: all requests went through Nitter's backend, which hid the IP address and made it impossible to track a visitor by their browser “fingerprint.”

The pages worked without JavaScript or ads, and were on average about fifteen times “lighter” than the original site — feeds, according to the developers, loaded several times faster. The project supported RSS feeds, themes, and a mobile layout, and was distributed under the AGPLv3 license, which prohibited running proprietary copies.

Why It Mattered

The authors explained the point of the endeavor directly in a “Why?” section. In their words, using Twitter without JavaScript enabled had become impossible, and since 2024 the site has additionally required registration. For those who care about privacy, this created a dead end: even a VPN and aggressive blockers like uBlock or uMatrix did not save you from tracking by browser “fingerprint,” which doesn't even need JavaScript. Adding to the urgency of the matter was the fact that Twitter had at one point stripped users of the ability to opt out of sharing their data with advertisers. By deploying their own Nitter instance on a VPS, a person could view tweets while remaining anonymous.

By the time it was shut down, the Nitter repository had gathered around 14 thousand stars and more than a thousand forks, and the list of public instances and browser extensions was maintained by the community through the project's wiki. Ironically, a tool created specifically to protect against a social network's tracking was shut down at the demand of that very network's owner.

Source: Lobsters