ARIN and APNIC give one university IPv4 transfer two times

One University /21, Two RIR Transfer Clocks, Six Hours Apart

Why it matters

ARIN and APNIC both record St Mary’s 140.184.16.0/21 moving to a Salesforce-named recipient. Their public timestamps disagree by 6 hours, 5 minutes and 15 seconds.

Theo March3 November 2026Reading Time 2 minLast update: 3 November 2026

ARIN and APNIC timestamp the same St Mary’s University /21 transfer more than six hours apart.

Summary

ARIN dates the St Mary’s University /21 transfer to 21 October 11:33:20 UTC; APNIC dates the same range to 05:28:05 UTC.
Three other ranges from the university went to Salesforce, Inc. within ARIN a week earlier; the four rows total 44,032 IPv4 addresses.

The address block has one set of boundaries and two official clocks. In ARIN’s cumulative transfer log, 140.184.16.0–140.184.23.255 leaves St Mary’s University in Canada for SalesForce.com, Inc. at 11:33:20 UTC on 21 October. The recipient RIR is APNIC. APNIC’s log records the same /21 and recipient at 05:28:05 UTC that day: a gap of 6 hours, 5 minutes and 15 seconds.

ARIN names the source university; APNIC writes SMU-Z and gives both organisations country code ZZ. ARIN’s current source RDAP record resolves SMU-Z to St Mary’s University and dates the parent registration to 1990. APNIC’s exact /21 RDAP record names SalesForce.com, Inc. as registrant and records registration at 05:28:28 UTC, 23 seconds after APNIC’s log time. The two transfer files give no field-level explanation for the clock gap; a joint transaction receipt would identify which step each timestamp marks.

The /21 followed a larger move. On 14 October, ARIN logged three other nonoverlapping pieces of the same 1990 university space going to Salesforce, Inc. inside its own region: a /22, a /19 and a /17. Together with the later /21, the four recorded ranges contain 44,032 addresses. A reader tracing this one source across RIRs must join a university name to a registry handle and two times to one /21.