People made thousands on this Amazon platform. Now it’s getting killed off.

Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced labor platform operated by Amazon since 2005, has announced plans to permanently shut down at the end of September, company representatives confirmed, sending some of its loyal users into a state of despair.  

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“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told SFGATE in a statement Wednesday. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk permanently, effective September 30, 2026.” 

The gig marketplace works by offering small, cheaply paid digital jobs like content rewriting, transcribing and data labeling to on-demand workers, who usually complete tasks priced at 10 cents or less and earn an average hourly wage of about $5. Registrants are authorized to work anywhere from the Americas to several countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. 

The platform’s odd moniker comes from the Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing device that fooled players into believing they were competing with a machine, when in reality, another person was hidden inside. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Jeff Bezos described it as “artificial artificial intelligence,” because fleets of “turkers” completed simple tasks en masse that computers couldn’t yet perform. 

Despite promising quick cash, ultimately, many of these tasks are used to train artificial intelligence to better recognize information, threatening to replace the very workers who power it, a 2023 article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review says. Described as a form of “ghost work,” “most of it is performed by a globally dispersed army of data workers who are paid pennies and have little recourse when they’re mistreated,” the article alleges. 

Though this hidden labor economy has been criticized by some for paying such miniscule wages, thousands of people have used it to remotely earn additional income. 

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These Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, sometimes amounted to thousands of dollars over the years, users on the Mechanical Turk subreddit wrote. One user, who posted a screenshot of their earnings amounting to $93,000, mourned the loss of the platform. “End of an era,” they commented. “MTurk was a huge part of my daily routine for a long time, and seeing it shut down genuinely feels like losing a piece of my life. It wasn’t just about the extra cash—it was the habit, the community, and knowing I could log on anytime to put work in.” 

“This has been my story since 2018,” one user wrote, expressing their sadness over the closure. 

“We made something work that not a lot of people understood or could do for a living,” another user commented under their post. “We’ll find something just as good or make something better.”