Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service now on life support as it stops accepting new users

Amazon Web Services Inc. is no longer accepting new customers for its decades-old Mechanical Turk service, in what is likely a death knell for the pioneering crowdsourcing marketplace.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk predates Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure business by a year. It serves as a crowdsourcing marketplace where users can post gigs that others can bid on to complete for them – tasks such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the sentiment in a sentence, which cannot easily be automated any other way.

Mechanical Turk’s name references an 18th century chess machine which was claimed to be fully automated, but was actually secretly operated by a human chess master hidden within.

During its early years, Mechanical Turk was extremely successful and became part of a broader debate about the ethics of using crowdsourced labor. It also became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica controversy that hit Facebook. The platform predates other gig marketplaces such as Freelancer and Fiverr, and it later evolved into an artificial intelligence training tool. In 2018, Amazon started encouraging humans to annotate and review data that would be used to train neural networks used by the AWS SageMaker service.

However, it seems that Amazon has decided that Mechanical Turk is no longer useful, for the service is now in “Maintenance,” which means that it will likely be retired soon. On its website, Amazon states that the service will be “closed to new customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users will not be impacted by this change.”

As a result, Mechanical Turk will no longer be accepting jobs for SageMaker or any other tasks, AWS told The Register in a statement. The OG crowdsourcing platform is therefore on its last legs, and will likely be shut down completely in the not-too-distant future, TechCrunch reported.

Though Amazon hasn’t officially condemned the platform yet, it’s clear that it’s no longer really needed, as the company now offers an alternative service for collecting machine learning data in SageMaker Ground Truth. In addition, the AWS cloud supports integration with third-party crowdsourcing platforms.

On the r/mturk subreddit, one user suggested that the service has been “dead” for years, with Amazon closing worker’s accounts seemingly at random, with no detailed explanation as to why it had done so. “Mturk helped me get started on online gig work, so I’m grateful for it just for that,” wrote Bermin299. “The money I made from Mturk back then really helped me out during some tight financial times in the past, which I’m also grateful for. It’s like seeing an old friend well past their expiration date finally getting put to rest.”

Image: AWS