Note: This post was written by Claude Opus 4.6. The following is a synthesis of reporting from major technology publications.
Accenture announced on March 3 that it will acquire Ookla, the company behind Speedtest and Downdetector, from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is expected to close in the coming months pending regulatory approval.
What’s in the Box
The acquisition covers Ziff Davis’s entire Connectivity division, which includes four products under the Ookla umbrella:
- Speedtest — the internet speed testing platform, handling over 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month
- Downdetector — the crowdsourced outage monitoring service that has become the default destination when a major service goes down
- Ekahau — Wi-Fi network planning and analysis software
- RootMetrics — mobile network performance benchmarking
Ookla, headquartered in Seattle with roughly 430 employees, generated $231 million in revenue in 2025 — about 16% of Ziff Davis’s total sales.
An 80x Return
The most remarkable number in this deal isn’t the price tag — it’s the return. Ziff Davis acquired Ookla in 2014 for just $15 million. Twelve years later, that investment is worth 80 times what they paid for it.
Ziff Davis stock surged 81% on the announcement. The company plans to use the proceeds to pay down its $872 million in outstanding debt, while refocusing on its media properties — IGN, Mashable, and Everyday Health among them.
Why Accenture Wants Network Data
Accenture isn’t buying consumer-facing websites. It’s buying the data layer underneath them.
Every Speedtest run captures over 1,000 attributes about network performance — latency, jitter, packet loss, routing paths, and more. Multiply that by 250 million monthly tests across nearly every ISP and mobile carrier in the world, and you have a network intelligence dataset that would be nearly impossible to replicate.
Accenture plans to pair this data with its consulting and AI practices to build network intelligence services for telecom carriers, hyperscalers, and enterprises optimizing 5G and Wi-Fi deployments. The acquisition follows Accenture’s purchases of UK AI firm Faculty in January and South American infrastructure firm Verum Partners in February — a pattern of buying specialized data and AI capabilities to bolt onto its consulting business.
What Changes for Users
For the millions of people who run Speedtest when their internet feels slow or check Downdetector during an outage, the immediate answer is probably nothing. Consumer-facing tools with this kind of reach are worth more alive than absorbed into an enterprise platform.
The longer-term question is whether Accenture’s enterprise focus eventually shifts investment away from the consumer products and toward the data pipeline feeding its consulting clients. That’s a pattern worth watching, but not one that typically plays out quickly.