Accenture Acquires Ziff Davis’ Ookla for $1.2B to Expand Network Intelligence Assets

Every time the internet slows down, millions of people run the same test. That quiet reflex turned one company into the scoreboard the digital world watches. That is the lane Ookla has occupied since 2006, when Mike Apgar spun the company out of Speakeasy with a simple obsession: measure the internet honestly. No marketing gloss. No carrier spin. Just the raw signal. Speedtest started as a diagnostic tool. It turned into a global reflex. When the WiFi coughs, millions of people instinctively tap the same button and ask the same question. What is my speed?

That small moment became infrastructure. Today Speedtest runs more than 11M tests a day, about 250M each month, across a network of 16,343 servers. The data set has passed 66.6B tests and counting. Add Downdetector watching 19,000 services across 45+ countries and collecting 25M incident reports a month, then fold in Ekahau designing WiFi environments for 15,000+ organizations and RootMetrics benchmarking mobile networks in the wild. Suddenly this is not just a toolkit. It is a living map of how the internet actually behaves when real people press refresh.

Now the signal gets louder. Accenture is acquiring Ziff Davis’s Connectivity division for $1.2B in cash. The package includes Ookla, Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, and RootMetrics. A clean strategic move. Accenture wants deeper network intelligence and better data foundations for AI driven infrastructure and enterprise connectivity. Ziff Davis built the asset portfolio over years of acquisitions, turning measurement into a business line that reported $231M in 2025 revenue, about 16% of total revenue.

The story still traces back to two builders who understood that measurement creates leverage. Mike Apgar started the experiment. Doug Suttles helped grow it into a global network intelligence engine after co founding the company and guiding it for more than 17 years. Today Stephen Bye serves as President and CEO, bringing telecom operator perspective shaped across companies like Sprint, Cox, AT&T, Telstra, and Optus. The leadership bench around Stephen Bye includes operators, engineers, and product minds who understand that networks are not theoretical. They are lived experiences measured in milliseconds.

Accenture sees what many enterprises are starting to realize. AI, edge computing, private 5G, and modern cloud infrastructure all depend on one stubborn truth. If the network slows down, everything slows down. Data might be the new oil, but connectivity is the pipeline. Tools like Speedtest and Downdetector are the pressure gauges on that pipeline, constantly reporting whether the system is flowing or choking.

So the scoreboard changes hands for $1.2B, but the question millions of people ask every day stays the same. Tap the button. Watch the needle move. Wait for the numbers to tell the truth about the network beneath your feet. Somewhere inside that quiet test is a company that turned curiosity into a global measurement system and made the internet just a little more honest.