X Corp sent Nitter two cease-and-desist letters in 2026 demanding permanent takedown

Nitter maintainer zedeus posted an October 10 update retracting the September 7 claim that legal counsel was secured. The update states both letters carried identical demands and threats. No representation exists. Donations are now directed first to legal costs with excess allocated to development or a successor project.

The letters followed years of X platform changes that broke public scraping, including API paywalls and rate-limit enforcement. Prior instances had already collapsed under technical load. Nitter's remaining operational footprint consists of volunteer-hosted mirrors that X can target individually through hosting providers without court filings.

Open-source front-ends that depend on single-platform data face repeated legal exposure once usage scales. Nitter's case shows that technical workarounds alone do not create durable alternatives when the upstream service treats scraping as a terms violation. Sustained operation now requires either coordinated legal defense or migration to federated protocols that do not rely on X data.

Zedeus requests direct contact from lawyers or organizations at [email protected]. Any further status updates will appear only on the nitter.net page.