Accenture to Acquire Ookla, Folding Speedtest and Downdetector into Its AI Stack

Accenture announced an agreement to acquire Ookla, the Ziff Davis-owned network intelligence firm behind Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, and RootMetrics. Terms were not disclosed. The deal pulls Ookla’s roughly 430 engineers and its dataset of more than 250 million monthly consumer-initiated tests into Accenture’s services portfolio, where it will be aimed at telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises building private 5G and Wi-Fi.

Accenture is framing the purchase as a play on network data as raw material for AI. CEO Julie Sweet pitched it as helping clients build trusted data foundations for scaling AI, while strategy chief Manish Sharma emphasized use cases beyond telecom benchmarking — fraud signals for banks, edge inference resilience for cloud providers, and workplace Wi-Fi design via Ekahau. Closing is subject to regulatory approval.

The acquisition consolidates a sizeable chunk of the independent connectivity-measurement market under a single consulting giant. Speedtest and Downdetector in particular have functioned as neutral public reference points for outages and ISP performance; their absorption into a vendor that sells optimization services to the same CSPs being measured raises obvious questions about long-term independence of the data.