BGP Route Monitor Screensaver
The BGP Route Monitor screensaver streams the real global BGP update firehose from RIPE NCC's RIS Live service — live counters for announcements and withdrawals per second, plus a rolling sample of individual routing events. It's free, needs an internet connection, and ESC exits.
How the BGP Route Monitor screensaver works
The saver opens a WebSocket straight to ris-live.ripe.net from your browser and subscribes to BGP update messages — no key, no server in between.
Every message is a real update seen by one of RIPE's route collectors: an announcement means a network is telling the internet how to reach a block of addresses, a withdrawal means that route just disappeared.
The stream runs at roughly two thousand messages a second, so the counters tally everything received while the list below shows a readable sample of individual events.
Each sampled row shows the prefix and the originating autonomous system number — announcements in white, withdrawals in red.
A worked example
A white row reading A 45.227.82.0/23 — origin AS267070 means AS267070 is advertising that block of addresses right now. When the withdrawals-per-second counter jumps and red rows flood the list, something has gone wrong somewhere on the internet — a cable cut, a router reload, a national shutdown or a route leak — often minutes before it shows up in the news.
Settings & tips
- Sampled rows per second sets how many individual events are pulled from the firehose into the readable list; the counters always tally the whole stream.
- Withdrawal spikes are the interesting signal — sustained red is usually an outage or a leak, not noise.
- It reconnects on its own if the stream drops, and the header reads
connecting…until the socket is live.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real routing data?
- Yes — it's RIPE NCC's RIS Live feed, the same public stream network operators and researchers use to watch global routing in real time.
- Does it need an API key?
- No. RIS Live is an open, key-less WebSocket; the saver identifies itself politely with a client name and nothing more.
- Does it work offline?
- No. It's a live stream, so offline the header simply reads connecting and no events arrive.
- What's the difference between an announcement and a withdrawal?
- An announcement offers a path to a block of IP addresses; a withdrawal takes one back. Big withdrawal spikes often mean an outage, a misconfiguration or a route leak somewhere in the world.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.