As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service levels temporarily, although that probably wasn’t necessary for countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, which were generally able to cope with the surge in demand caused by people teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix).But in countries without the same level of investment in network infrastructure, the picture was less rosy: Internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa and Venezuela, for instance, reported significant strain.The content delivery networks (CDNs) used by streaming services such as Netflix help address the problem by temporarily storing content close to, or even inside, many ISPs.Instead of asking a particular provider, “Please send me this file,” your machine asks the network, “Who can send me this file?” It starts by querying peers: other computers in the user’s vicinity, others in the same house or office, others in the same neighborhood, others in the same city—expanding progressively outward to globally distant locations, if need be, until the system finds a copy of what you’re looking for.Building on the principles of peer-to-peer networking and content-based addressing, IPFS allows for a decentralized and distributed network for data storage and delivery."