Changes in the topology of communication networks, such as sudden appearance or disappearance of links or nodes, may signal malicious attacks or malfunctions. A topology change detector may thus be useful to trigger alarms or self-reconfiguration procedures. Here we present a novel approach that enjoys several desirable qualities such as fast convergence, intrinsically distributed computations, and scalability w.r.t. communication and computational requirements. We characterize the performance of this technique from analytical and practical points of view, providing theoretical results on its performance. We thus show how it is possible to tune and trade-off the accuracy of the change detection results with the communication requirements of the procedure.