Downdetector, Speedtest sold to IT service provider Accenture in $1.2B deal

In a statement, Accenture CEO and chair Julie Sweet said:

By acquiring Ookla, we will help our clients across business and government scale AI safely and build the trusted data foundations they need to deliver the reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value.

Current Accenture public sector clients include the US Air Force, the US Social Security Administration, and, recently, the US Department of State.

Speedtest and Downdetector are popular among people seeking something to help quickly test their current internet speed and the status of online services, respectively. Downdetector is often cited by media reports discussing the availability of websites, apps, banks, and more.

Under Ziff Davis, both programs also have business-to-business (B2B) applications. Using Speedtest, for instance, Ookla gathers, aggregates, and analyzes data for “billions of mobile network samples daily, which measure radio signal levels, network coverage, and availability, and [quality of experience] metrics for a number of connected experiences, such as streaming video, video conferencing, gaming, web browsing, and CDN and cloud provider performance,” Ookla says. Currently, Speedtest claims telecommunications operators, regulatory and trade bodies, analysts, journalists, and nonprofits as B2B customers.

Downdetector Explorer, meanwhile, is a monitoring tool that’s supposed to help businesses detect outages. Customers include streaming services, banks, social networks, and communication service providers.

Should Accenture’s acquisition close, the IT consultant will similarly use data from Speedtest and Downdetector to inform clients, and individual users will be subject to a new privacy policy and any other changes Accenture potentially makes.

An Accenture spokesperson told Ars Technica that Accenture plans to operate the Ookla “business as it operates today.”