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Black Hole

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:36 am
Slang term for a router that goes down (offline) and whose absence goes undetected by other routers on the network. Packets that are forwarded to that router simply get dropped and never arrive at their destination. Black holes are unable to generate destination unreachable messages, so users are left unaware that data is being lost.