About Peer Drift

What is Peer Drift?

Every Autonomous System (AS) on the internet — every ISP, cloud provider, university network, and content delivery network — has business relationships with other ASes: who it pays for transit (its providers), who pays it (its customers), and who it exchanges traffic with for free (its peers). Tools like Hurricane Electric's BGP Toolkit and PeeringDB show you this network today, as a static snapshot.

Peer Drift shows you the same relationships, but across time. It tracks when an AS gains a new provider, drops a peer, or reclassifies a relationship — and flags which of those changes are actually unusual, rather than routine noise.

Why we built it

A single snapshot of "who peers with whom" tells you the current shape of the internet. It doesn't tell you whether that shape is stable, consolidating, or actively shifting — and by the time a static snapshot is out of date, there's no record of what changed or when. Relationship changes are also genuinely meaningful signals: a network dropping all its upstream providers can indicate an outage or a de-peering dispute; a small regional network suddenly gaining dozens of peers can indicate a new internet exchange presence; a large provider steadily losing customers over months can indicate market consolidation.

None of that is visible in a snapshot. It's only visible in the diff between snapshots — which is what Peer Drift computes and stores permanently, rather than overwriting with each update.

Use cases

• Peering coordinators & network engineers — monitor your own AS's upstream and peer relationships for unexpected changes, or check a prospective peer's or customer's recent stability before signing an agreement.
• Competitive & market intelligence — track how a competitor, customer, or vendor's infrastructure footprint is evolving (new peering strategy, provider consolidation, geographic expansion via new IX presence).
• Internet research — study topology evolution over time: the rise and fall of transit providers, the flattening of the AS-level hierarchy, or how customer cones shift as networks consolidate.
• Infrastructure due diligence — as part of evaluating an acquisition or investment target, check whether their network infrastructure has been stable or in flux.
• Education — a concrete, real-data way to understand how the internet's business relationships (not just its physical topology) actually work and change.
• Situational awareness — check the Weather Report for a daily read on whether the routing table as a whole is calm or unsettled, without looking up any specific ASN.

Peer Drift is not a security monitoring tool — it doesn't detect route leaks, hijacks, or attacks. See Limitations in the documentation.

What is the BGP Weather Report?

The Weather Report is a companion daily digest of the same underlying data — network- wide trend, confirmed churn, and per-ASN address-space anomalies — read as a synoptic overview of the whole routing table rather than a lookup for one AS. Where the drift feed answers "what changed for this ASN," the Weather Report answers "is the internet, on the whole, calm or unsettled today," at a glance and without looking up anything specific.