What Is Packet Loss?
Packet loss means some IP packets were dropped or discarded before delivery. Applications then wait, retransmit, or glitch. It is a reliability problem, not a synonym for “slow megabits”.
Where packets drop
Wi‑Fi collisions, bad cables, saturated queues, and ISP faults all drop packets.
What this site can measure
We can time HTTP probes and report timeouts. That is a related diagnostic, not a network-layer loss percentage.
Why games show a different number
Game clients often count UDP packets to one server. That path is not your whole internet.
Frequently asked questions
Is 1% loss bad?
For real-time audio and some games, yes. For a large download with retries, it may only look like a slower transfer.
Is HTTP failure packet loss?
Not by itself. An HTTP error can be DNS, TLS, or an application status.