Packet loss

Okay kiddo, imagine you're sending a letter to your friend. You put the letter in an envelope and write your friend's name and address on it. Then you give the envelope to the mailman and he brings it to your friend's house.

Now imagine that the mailman is really busy and he drops some of the envelopes along the way. Your friend gets some of the letters, but not all of them because they were lost on the way. That's kind of like what happens with packet loss.

When you use the internet, your computer is sending lots of little packages of information called "packets" to the website you're trying to visit. Each packet has a little bit of the information, like a sentence in your letter.

But sometimes, the packets get lost on the way, just like the letters that the mailman dropped. That means that the website doesn't get all the information it needs to show you the page you want to see, and it might not work properly.

It's a bit like if you had a puzzle and some of the pieces were missing. You can't finish the puzzle properly if you don't have all the pieces!

Packet loss can happen for lots of reasons, like if your internet connection is slow, if the website you're visiting is very busy, or if there's something wrong with the cables that send the packets. But it's not usually a big problem, and most of the time you won't even notice it happening.