Imagine you’re trying to send yourself a letter, but instead of walking to the post office, you drop it into your own mailbox. That’s essentially what a loopback address does in the world of networking.
The loopback address is a type of IP address that allows a computer to send network traffic back to itself. In the IPv4 addressing scheme, this address is commonly 127.0.0.1. In IPv6, it’s ::1. This network traffic never leaves the computer that sent the request, meaning there is no way for outside systems or networks to know that this loopback network activity is happening.
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