Hey Jibroni,

Thanks for getting in touch - I'm happy to shed some light on this subject.

When you see all that red show up in a trace, it's only natural to think something is wrong. However, as long as this packet loss doesn't carry through to the destination, it's not something to worry about!

This sort of packet loss indicates that your router is "de-prioritizing" or dropping ICMP Time Exceeded responses when it is an intermediate hop. To verify if this packet loss is "real" you would do as you already did - start a trace directly to your router.

If you're interested, here are a couple of articles that can explain this concept a bit more:

Interpreting Latency and Packet Loss
One poorly responding router


It doesn't look like the latency spike at hop 8 affected the packet loss. That looks like it started at the destination, as in the gaming server was having issues during that time period.

I hope that helps! If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Thanks,