Amazon Web Services is winding down Mechanical Turk, one of the original online crowdsourcing platforms, according to a report by Simon Sharwood at The Register.
AWS says the service will no longer accept new customers and is being placed into "maintenance" mode, a status that signals its eventual retirement, The Register reports. In practice, maintenance mode means a product still runs but stops getting new features or new sign-ups while the company plans its exit.
Mechanical Turk, often shortened to MTurk, has been around since the mid-2000s. It works by breaking large jobs into small "human intelligence tasks" that people complete for pay online, such as labeling images, checking data, or transcribing text. The name is a nod to an 18th-century chess-playing "machine" that secretly had a human hidden inside, capturing the idea of tasks that look automated but rely on real people behind the scenes.
According to The Register, workers who use the platform say AWS has been closing accounts. The report frames these moves together as the clearest sign yet that Amazon intends to retire the long-running service.
Why it matters: MTurk helped popularize the gig-style, task-based labor model that now underpins much of how modern datasets are built and cleaned, so its slow shutdown marks the fading of an early piece of internet infrastructure that many workers and researchers still depend on.