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Accenture to acquire Ookla
https://www.theverge.com/tech/889234/downdetector-ookla-speedtest-sold-accenture https://www.theverge.com/tech/889234/downdetector-ookla-spee..., https://archive.ph/FR8ND https://archive.ph/FR8ND
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/downdetector-speedtest-sold-to-it-service-provider-accenture-in-1-2b-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/downd...
- coreyh14444 4mo agoWhy tho?
- folkrav 4mo agoIt's almost always user data these days, so probably that.
- ranger_danger 4mo agoMaybe the owners were ready to cash out and move on with life?
- IshKebab 4mo agoThat seems like a lot for name recognition. I bet you could rebuild their technology for like $20m at the most, and buy 100% market share for like $100m easy. Unless they have some other assets other than the obvious?
- pyvpx 4mo agoIt takes more than money to supplant the name brand that every ISP games and every front line support worker uses by name
- cyanydeez 4mo agoselling peoples ip addres for some reason along with whatever privacy invasion tech they have.
- jedberg 4mo agoFast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it. Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
- tcdent 4mo agoFast is a Netflix product so the fact that you've even heard of it is in direct relation to the weight of the brand that launched it. speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long. (Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)
- wartywhoa23 4mo agoIsn't Speedtest's huge dataset of Internet speeds mapped to time, location and IP address, as well as data on VPN usage (a user checks the speed of his/her direct connection then turns VPN on and checks over that too, all within the same session) such an asset? I doubt they didn't collect all of that. P.S. Now marry that huge dataset with services that Accenture provides, among others: "In February 2025, Vice News spoke to a former Accenture employee under the condition of anonymity. His project on the WhatsApp team for Meta required him to sift through images and decide whether or not they depicted child sexual abuse, which he coped with "through a lot of substance abuse". The former employee claimed to have witnessed multiple missed opportunities to protect children, and alleged that one colleague had previously been arrested for possessing child abuse materials. In a statement, Accenture said they are "committed to helping companies keep their platforms safe through services such as content, advertising, and compliance reviews."¹ ¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
- IshKebab 4mo agoHard to see how that is remotely worth $1bn.
- progforlyfe 4mo agothat's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it. Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...
- kingleopold 4mo agodont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.
- fontain 4mo agoOokla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network. https://www.ookla.com/ https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website
- rozenmd 4mo agothe best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too
- tjoff 4mo agoJust searching surely does not mark them as down?
- Xenoamorphous 4mo agoIt does.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoEvidence?
- jpalomaki 4mo ago"By integrating Ookla’s data products, including Speedtest®, Downdetector®, Ekahau®, and RootMetrics®, Accenture will help Communications Service Providers (CSPs), hyperscalers, and enterprises optimize the mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks that power their digital core. [...] Ookla’s data platform is anchored by more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month, complemented by controlled drive, walk, and embedded testing options"[1] [1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/accenture-to-acquire-ookla-to-strengthen-network-intelligence-and-experience-with-data-and-ai-for-enterprises https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/accenture-to-acquir...
- simonw 4mo agoIs there some legal reason to scatter announcements with that many ® symbols, or do they just do it for style reasons / because they think it makes the announcement look more impressive?
- conception 4mo agoLegal. Gotta protect your trademarks.
- Suppafly 4mo agoTo a degree, but I've never seen anything requiring you to show a mark literally every time it's mentioned.
- kube-system 4mo agoUsing the symbol allows them greater protection under the Lanham act, because it counts as “notice” that the mark is registered. Without it, it limits your ability to recover damages from infringement.
- trollbridge 4mo agoWhen you are making the absurd case you’ve trademarked “speed test”, yes, you have to take pains to mark it.
- 4mo ago
- MaciejR 4mo agoAnd now every SLA that Accenture is held to for uptime suddenly will never be breached…
- yokoprime 4mo agomay i suggest nettfart.no by the norwegian government as an alternative ? at least the name is fun
- joshuat 4mo agofast.com is my go-to in the rare case I need to check network speed these days
- taberiand 4mo agoWe used fast.com to speed test our new office internet connection and the next day got an irate email from corporate (who had argued we didn't need the new connection) about "watching Netflix all day". I imagine some C-level thought they had a real gotcha! moment until I showed them the site.
- musicale 4mo agoThis is another advantage of fast.com.
- cseleborg 4mo agoI read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.
- cseleborg 4mo agoOut of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.
- Spooky23 4mo agoThat was very relevant in some scenarios. When Spectrum was fighting with Netflix, they would force Netflix traffic to a peer circuit that was under provisioned as a shakedown tactic. Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.
- fleroviumna 4mo ago[dead]
- functionmouse 4mo agouse https://speedof.me https://speedof.me
- forcer 4mo agoI am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant. To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
- Melatonic 4mo agoAny recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use
- esseph 4mo agoMost will show you speed / latency / packetloss with the toggleable option for multi-single threaded. What would you like to see?
- aryehof 4mo ago> Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?
- dgellow 4mo agoMNOs => Mobile Network Operators
- contingencies 4mo agoJust wanted to say congratulations!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
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- iambateman 4mo agoI would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.
- esseph 4mo agoThey are embedded in several points in many, many networks all over the world. They get real-world metrics, sometimes live as events are happening. And they don't own most of this infra, it's hosted voluntarily inside service provider and corporate networks.
- 1a527dd5 4mo agoBig fan of https://speedtest.aa.net.uk https://speedtest.aa.net.uk
- system2 4mo agoTerrible domain name.
- throwawa14223 4mo agoMay it fail and take Accenture with them.
- gschizas 4mo agoAccenture is more resilient than cockroaches.
- throwaway81523 4mo agoNot THAT Ookla, darn it. http://www.ooklathemok.com/ http://www.ooklathemok.com/
- dhruvarora013 4mo agoWorked there for half a decade and helped a little on this deal but exited right before. Like another commenter pointed out, the deal is a data acquisition. Ookla is multimillion dollar business thanks to its awards and data programs with almost every telco a customer. Accenture was already a competitor thanks to their Umlaut acquisition For most consumers, Ookla = Speedtest but there’s a lot more beneath the surface. Ookla owns a drive-testing firm, Downdetector (consumer based outage reporting) and a thriving SDK & server network. Most of the data comes via background tests and embedded SDK tests.
- gjmveloso 4mo agoI don’t think I would trust Downdetector in the hands of a company that its main business is consulting some of the same business to assess. Imagine a large Accenture business being down. Would they provide that evidence even when that could harm their own SLA commitments with their clients? I would trust Datadog more with https://updog.ai/ https://updog.ai/
- shevy-java 4mo agoThere is something I never liked about Crapcenture - it's corporate culture is so weird and almost cult-like. There is no doubt they are successful but I question whether that model should even exist in the first place.
- tulga 4mo ago[flagged]
- Ruslan1095 4mo ago[dead]
- FlippieFinance 4mo agoI really hope they don't change the interface of the speedchecker because it's so clean rn