Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the crowdsourcing marketplace that connects businesses with a global, on-demand workforce for microtasks, will permanently close on September 30, 2026. The announcement, posted on the MTurk website, states that Amazon regularly evaluates its programs, tools, and services and makes adjustments based on those assessments. Following such an assessment, the company decided to close the service. The notice directs current Workers and Requesters to an FAQ page to learn how to prepare for the closure. MTurk has been used for tasks such as data validation, survey participation, content moderation, and data deduplication, and it allowed companies to scale their workforce flexibly and reduce costs through a pay-per-task model. The closure marks the end of a service that enabled businesses to outsource manual, time-consuming projects to distributed workers over the internet.
Developers relying on MTurk for crowdsourced data labeling and microtasks must find alternatives before the September 30, 2026 shutdown.