Series of tubes

A series of tubes is a way of thinking about how messages and data have to travel over the internet. Imagine a bunch of pipes connected together in a long line, like a series of tubes. Each piece of data, like an email or a webpage, has to get from where it starts to where it needs to go. It has to go through the tubes, one after the other, until it finally reaches its destination. So if something goes wrong along the way, it can slow down the whole process, like a traffic jam would slow down a bunch of cars at once.