The reason why you cannot reach a specific web site at any given time can be very simple. Server and hosting issues, maintenance or the plain fact that a site has been discontinued are the most likely explanations why a site just won’t load. But there is another, more mysterious possibility: Black holes. A team at the University of Washington has begun mapping scenarios where information packets on the Internet simply disappear.

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.



The Hubble system operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur, and has operated continuously since September 17, 2007.

To determine a network status, Hubble sends test messages around the world to look for computers that can be reached from some but not the entire Internet, a situation that is described as “partial reachability”. Hubble's lead programmer, Ethan Katz-Bassett, said that short communication blips are ignored. However, if a problem surfaces in two consecutive 15-minute trials, it is listed as a “problem”. The research team found that more than 7% of computers worldwide experienced this type of error at least once during a three-week period in fall of 2007.

The use of Google Maps on the Hubble page makes it easy to roam the globe and zoom in on places of interest, and it seems that while many of these internet black holes are un the US and Europe (Switzerland being the worse offender), there's quite an unhealthy cloud of them here in Australia. In Sydney, north of the CBD seems to be working perfectly but south -- in an area than spans from Bankstown to Sutherland -- there are over three dozen of these black holes, with other concentrations in & around Canberra and, of all places, Parkes, home of the Siding Springs Observatory. Melbourne and Perth are almost completely free of these voids in the internet, Adelaide is unplagued but there is an unusually dense clump of voids in South Australia's far north, west of the township of Indulkana ... which, funnily enough, is where there is a US military presence, and why there are no hi-res sat-pics of that area.

As a final touch of irony, I did some tracebacks on a random sampling of the black holes in Sydney, and guess what -- of the ten I examined, five belong to Telstra's IP-space, two to PowerTel, one to Connect, and one to TPG, with one that I couldn't find an 'owner' for.

Very nice work Brains

Any chance please that we can make this a full MTAU featured article???

Pretty please?

So we can blame CERN for black holes after all

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It was worth doing the original post just to get your response. You made my breakfast mate, you really did

Well ditto, your writings was a great read for this morning, would like to share with many, so would be good as a feature article, and then get it on Digg.

I should mention that I came across the Hubble project early this morning thanks to StumbleUpon, and thought the information worthy of spreading around.

StumbleUpon is very cool

Somewhere in my past I have heard of StumbleUpon, remind me please.

I encountered that problem, where, due to the huge complexity of IP ranges, the routing for a fair bit of them is screwed up. On my old cable connection, for some time I couldn't access Youtube and quite a bit of the net.

Thanks for finding this. I'm glad to know that it's being monitored.

Still any chance of this being a featured article?

I agree.. this is a well written and interesting article...

I think it's worthy of another vote to go with SyncMans's support...

I vote for this to be a featured article too... that is if it's by vote now?
Or is it still the Admin's veto on what goes and what doesn't go as a featured article?

Yep, it will go up some time today (and you can all Digg it )

Good one, can't wait.

Has Brains yet feature on "Meet the MacTalkers"?

I haven't been accosted by andrew over it yet, so no. Seems he goes by whomever he interviewed last, and who they wante to see interviewed next. I think I get up too many people's noses here with my anti-TV, anti-wifi preaching :P

I'm sure if you live in China the majority of the internet is a black hole