Hey there!

Thanks for getting in touch with us!

I definitely get why this would be alarming. The most important thing to note is that the final destination is always the most important - so if that packet loss isn't carrying through, it ultimately doesn't bear any weight in your investigation.

We send out TTL expired packets to the intermediate hops (and traceroute does not)- and sometimes those hops don't like those packets, and discard them. However, you can likely see that the next hops are responding - this means that the offending hop is actually forwarding packets, and, again, does not bear any weight in our investigation as long as that final hop looks good.

You can check out more information on this here:

https://www.pingman.com/kb/article/packet-loss-or-latency-at-intermediate-hops-24.html

Let us know if that helped!