Are you using it via tor or not?.
Have you tried deleting peers.dat when this happens or disabling antivirus (there might be a workaround for this if you run it in a virtual machine so you can keep your main machine secure but your virtual machine quarantined and sandboxed. Also deleting the blocks folder generally helps.more than deleting chainstate.
Could you point me in the direction for instructions to use via Tor?
Tried deleting peers.dat to no avail.
I do not have any antivirus or firewalls enabled (Linux)