The Hole Emoji definition The maintenance hole emoji is an image of a circular dark (suggesting that it is rather deep) hole on some surface (not shown) that appears like a maintenance hole without a cover. It can have several connotations, including traps, failures of any type, and unanticipated difficulties. Users may depict this symbol to indicate that they will be unable to respond to messages for an extended period of time because they will be too busy working on a project or task that has been assigned to them. The hole was first introduced into Unicode in April 2014 as part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block. It was created by Ryohei Maruyama of Chara-Ani. Here is how the hole looks like: