Joining empty lobbies/servers

So everyone knows of the bug where you get put in an empty server consistently. I just the other day waited a literal 8 hours for a server to fill up while I did uni work on my laptop... The game never got enough people. However my friend launches the game and finds a full server straight away. he has successfully done this for the past 2 weeks thus leading me to think something is wrong with my game. I have restarted my internet and reinstalled my game with no success of fixing the problem. I've tried to join US servers as well but again, it puts me in an empty server with literally no one in it. Why does my game insist on creating the server for people to join rather than joining other servers ???