Imaginary Landscape, LLC

Ever wonder what happens when an email gets lost or a Web site is unavailable?

Sure, there are the worldly explanations:

• Someone forgot to pay their hosting bill
• A truck ran into a power substation and blew the grid
• Someone fat-fingered the keyboard while logged in as root

If however, you eliminate all these reasons, one remains.

A black hole.

According to the University of Washington, there are a number of servers across the Internet - connected and accessible - that sometimes lose data for unexplainable reasons. These "black holes" are being mapped through a project called Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time at UW.

So, next time you forget to send an important email, just say, "It must have been eaten by a black hole."

"No, really."