Did Your Email Hit The Black Hole?

We’ve all been there when someone you sent an email to claims they never received it. You are certain you sent it and double check, and yep, there it is sitting in your sent items box.

Now there are two possibilities here: first up is your friends a liar. They read it and were too lazy to reply or weren’t interested in your latest BS.

Or secondly, your email hit the information superhighway ‘black hole’ - wtf? Yes the internet has a big black hole that pops up from place to place and to better explain it are the folks at Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time

Having trouble accessing a favorite Web site? Perhaps the site was taken offline, or the computer hosting it is down for maintenance. However, the cause could be something more mysterious. At any given moment, a portion of Internet traffic ends up being routed into information “black holes.” These are situations where advertised paths exist to the destination, but messages - a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way.

Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 939,662 black holes and reachability problems