Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk (MTurk) on 30 September — and it takes SageMaker Ground Truth and A2I with it; plus InstantDB Cloud gets its confirmed end date

Two new entries tonight, and unusually for a late-August night both are substantial — one imminent and high-profile, one that finally clears a rumor off our watch list.

New: Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk (MTurk) on 30 September

Amazon Mechanical Turk — the 21-year-old crowdsourcing marketplace where requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and a global crowd completes them, driven programmatically through the MTurk API — is being permanently closed. Per Amazon’s official Closure FAQs, “following an assessment” AWS has decided to shut MTurk down on 30 September 2026. New customer registration already stopped on 30 July. On the closure date, HIT submission ends and every remaining unsubmitted HIT automatically expires — so any pipeline that calls the MTurk API for human data work stops returning results that day.

The part worth flagging: the closure is not limited to the MTurk console. The same date ends the Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker type in SageMaker Ground Truth labeling jobs and in Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) human-review workflows. Plenty of ML teams reach MTurk only through those services and never touch the marketplace directly; they’re in scope too. The money and records wind down on their own clock — bonuses and approvals run until 30 October 2026, pre-paid balances refund within 30 days, and transaction history stays available only until 28 January 2027, which is the deadline to export anything you need for the record. There’s no in-place AWS successor: MTurk, Ground Truth, and A2I are all closing together, so the move is off-platform, to a managed labeling provider (Scale, Labelbox, Appen, Toloka, Prolific for studies) or a self-hosted labeling stack.

New: InstantDB (Instant Cloud) has a confirmed end date — 31 August 2027

We’ve carried the InstantDB wind-down on the watch list for weeks and refused to publish it, because it traced only to a forwarded email and we don’t log a shutdown off an unverifiable rumor. That changed today: Instant has said it publicly, on its own site. In an official post, the team announced it is joining OpenAI and is winding down Instant Cloud, the hosted side of its open-source realtime database (a Firebase-style stack with auth, storage, and sync behind the @instantdb/react / @instantdb/core packages).

The dated facts, from Instant: new signups are closed, existing users should migrate off Instant Cloud within about 12 months, all cloud apps shut down on 31 August 2027, backups stay available until 31 August 2028, and subscriptions started after 31 July 2026 are fully refunded. The soft landing here is that only the hosted service is ending — Instant is fully open source, and the recommended path is to self-host it, keeping the same SDKs and repointing the client rather than rewriting the data layer. Leaving Instant entirely (Supabase, Firestore, Convex, PocketBase, Appwrite) is the larger job. Either way, the easy-to-miss deadline is the backup window: export your data before 31 August 2028.

On the board: the late-August cluster keeps firing

• 27 August (today) — Convictional’s platform access ends; the entry is now marked passed. Export catalog and order data if you haven’t.
• 28 August — OCI DevOps retires its Oracle Linux 7 build runners; pinned pipelines break rather than warn.
• 31 August — a four-way pile-up: GitHub Spark, Flowise cloud, the New Relic drop-filter-rules API, and the Power Automate mobile app.

Further out: OpenSSL 3.0 (7 September), the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September), the Relay and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements (both 14 September), and now MTurk itself on 30 September. All eleven entries within 30 days re-checked clean against their primary sources tonight; the Sentinel SAP date, which our monitor can’t read off Microsoft’s JavaScript-rendered updates page, was re-confirmed against Microsoft’s release-communications API. The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.

Both of tonight’s shutdowns are detectable in your own code: the lastcall CLI — npx lastcall.dev check — flags a repo that talks to the MTurk API or depends on the Instant SDKs, from the same public dataset this site is built on.