If you've been doing anything more than sitting at home alone dropping cubes off towers or checking the hiccup time you get when you cross a sim boundary, you will know what a horrendous condition intergrid communications has reached. For many months now, sending offline IMs to people on other grids - which used to work just fine - fails more often than it works. When this started, it took me a few days to notice that the 'User not online. Message saved' message was actually saying 'Unable to send instant message. User is not logged in.' which caused some really amusing headaches. But of course, now we have all learned that to be sure your reply gets through, you must actually go to the other person's grid to send it.