In places where gravity is very strong, time as we understand it can break down completely. At the edge of black holes, for example, the powerful gravitational pull slows time dramatically, says Prescod-Weinstein. And upon crossing the black hole’s point of no return, known as its event-horizon, she says space and time flip. Far from the Earth, time gets extremely weird. Black holes can cause it to stretch and even break down entirely.
“You end up in a region where space now has an arrow, and it’s one direction … and time doesn’t have an arrow like it did before,” she says. “There’s really no sense of time.” -[Source](https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/28/researchers-say-time-is-an-illusion-so-why-are-we-all-obsessed-with-it/)
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Time and space depend on the observer. And various effects can rotate or squish them together.
What looks like “forwards in time” to one person can be “downwards” to another person.
When viewed from the outside something near the event horizon of a black hole has almost all of its “forwards in time” direction rotated into a “downwards” direction, so it seems to experience very little time instead being forward downwards (i.e. falling; falling happens when our “moving through time” motion is rotated into someone else’s “downwards” direction).
Locally, from the object’s point of view, things look fairly normal (although there may be some very steep gravitational gradients and tidal forces).
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