Hundreds of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform were left unable to work after mass account suspensions caused by a suspected glitch in the e-commerce giant’s payments system.
Beginning on 16 May 2024, a number of US-based Mechanical Turk workers began receiving account suspension forms from Amazon, locking them out of their accounts and preventing them from completing more work on the crowdsourcing platform.
Owned and operated by Amazon, Mechanical Turk allows businesses, or “requesters”, to outsource various processes to a “distributed workforce”, who then complete tasks virtually from wherever they are based in the world, including data annotation, surveys, content moderation and artificial intelligence (AI) training.
According to those Computer Weekly spoke with, the suspensions were purportedly tied to issues with the workers’ Amazon Payment accounts, an online payments processing service that allows them to both receive wages and make purchases from Amazon.
One of the account suspension messages seen by Computer Weekly read: “Your Amazon Payments account has been suspended. You will not be able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk until your Amazon Payments account is in good standing.”
While the issue seemed isolated at first, workers organised under Turkopticon – an “advocacy organisation” for the collective interests of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers – began speaking to each other and realised it was a much more widespread issue after a large wave of Payment-related suspensions affected dozens of individuals at once near the end of August.
Within a few days of posting a feedback form online to track the number of suspensions on 25 August, the advocacy group received around 150 submissions from workers who had lost access to their accounts, which increased to 305 by the end of the first week in September.
While a few dozen workers began to have their accounts reinstated within a couple of weeks, the issue has persisted for many, with just 146 confirmed account reinstatement by time of publication, according to Turkopticon.
Due to a lack of communication from Amazon, the workers said they are unaware of the exact nature of the issue, although they believe it was likely caused by a glitch with some aspect of the Payments system.
Computer Weekly contacted Amazon about the account suspensions, including how many workers were ultimately affected and whether a system glitch led to the issues faced by workers.
“This issue affected a relatively small subset of MTurk workers and is now fully resolved, but we regret any inconvenience these workers may have experienced,” said Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan. “We work to address any issues with MTurk as soon as possible, and evaluate processes to find opportunities for improvement, both in how the service operates and how we share updates with workers and requesters.”
Amazon added that the numbers cited about account reinstatements are inaccurate, as the matter has now been addressed for all accounts that were affected, and that both workers and requesters can check the status of Mechanical Turk on its service health dashboard.
Amazon also questioned the timeline of account suspensions, noting that the dates provided suggest the issue started earlier than it actually did. Amazon declined to comment further when asked for clarification on the timeline.
Account suspensions roll in
After receiving the initial suspension messages, workers said while they were unable to work on the platform or receive payments from it, they were still able to purchase products from Amazon’s website.
They added that workers were either passed around between Amazon’s different customer service departments for Payments and Mechanical Turk, or otherwise told to create a new account to continue working.
However, one worker described creating a second account as a “huge violation” of Amazon’s own terms of service, noting it has previously been used as a reason for other account suspensions.
“Workers who have taken this awful advice now have an account without any of the qualifications they previously earned. It is like starting over from day one. Imagine being in grad school only to have someone tell you to start over from your freshman year,” said long-time Mechanical Turk worker and lead organiser at Turkopticon, Krystal Kauffman.
“They also wouldn’t let people work because of a Payment account issue, but they would let people buy [from] Amazon using those very same payment methods, which just seems wrong.”
She said that even for those workers who experienced relatively brief suspensions compared to others, “you’ve still missed two weeks of pay and then you’re behind”, adding: “You’ve accumulated late fees on your bills [etc], and then you have to work extra to make up for the system being down. So, it’s very frustrating for the workers who depend on [the platform].”
Giving the example of a 68-year-old man who was “frantic” when he got in touch with Turkopticon, Kauffman said he was unable to buy food or pay rent during his account suspension due to it being his main source of income.
She said his and other workers’ frustration was only intensified by the lack of clarity provided by Amazon around the issue that led to the suspension, and the inability of workers “to get hold of a person who could just fix it”.
Although many turn to Mechanical Turk and other platforms due the flexibility it gives them and the ability to supplement other streams of income, many use if as their primary way of making money.
On the volume of affected workers, Krista Pawloski – another long-time Mechanical Turk worker and Turkopticon organiser – said that although Turkopticon was able to identify hundreds of account suspensions linked to the Amazon Payment issue, the group is unable to reach every worker on the platform, meaning there could be countless more experiencing the same problem.
“Those are just the ones we heard of – there’s obviously workers out there who were affected who don’t know about us,” she said, adding that it’s usually “final” when Amazon decides to suspend an account. “So, a lot of people may have gotten suspended and said, ‘Oh, this is the end of the road for me’, and they’re not even paying attention to the situation anymore – they could potentially have their accounts back and not even know it.”
Pawloski further added that in the case of two workers who did end up creating new accounts on the advice of Amazon, these were subsequently banned from working on the platform.
Track record
Speaking about a previous round of mass suspensions from January 2024, Kauffman relayed how usually these issues are linked to specific tasks that workers are being asked to perform.
In that instance, she said that while there was a two-week long back-and-forth with Amazon trying to identify the issue, the workers themselves were able to figure out what went wrong and what task the suspensions were tied to within half an hour of getting together in the same room.
“Why is it that this small group of people can come together and find the problem, and why should we have to tell Amazon what their problem is? Why aren’t they fixing this themselves?” she said.
“I find it hard to believe that they’re lacking in skills and education to find the problem…We identified the task, we identified the problem, and it was fixed. We weren’t so lucky this time, but slowly, accounts started to be reinstated.”
This time around, the workers who gathered to figure out why they had been suspended were unable to find any commonalities, such as a shared task they completed or having accounts with particular banks.
“We had a couple of different meetings with all the suspended workers, trying to find common ground between everybody, and couldn’t. It really did just seem to be a glitch,” said Pawloski.
She added that from her experience with previous rounds of mass suspension – including the one from January – Amazon never provides details to the workers on exactly what went wrong, how it was resolved, and how to avoid getting caught up in other automated suspensions. So far, the same has been true of the Payments issue.
Ultimately, the workers want Amazon to provide clarity and timely updates when issues arise on the Mechanical Turk platform, rather than being left in the lurch with potentially no money coming in.
“No matter what [the Payments issue] was, you can put a PR spin on it, just let people know,” said Pawloski. “Some people rely on this for their livelihood. It’s their main source of income, and you just took it away. Give them something.”
Following her previous experience of being caught up in the January mass suspension, Pawloski – who has a task rejection rate of 0.01 from nearly a million tasks – said she has looked to diversify her income streams even more, because having to rely on Mechanical Turk for “a big chunk” of her income was becoming unrealistic.
“I hardly any work on MTurk anymore, so they’re driving away good workers. I’ve been on the platform since 2008, I have almost a million hits completed, with [around] 140 of them rejected,” she said: “I’m a good worker, and they drove me away.”