DOW: Anniversary Edition Soulstorm (gog version) issue

So me and my friend just got the Anniversary Edition of DOW 1 on GOG and ran into a wierd technical problem. We are playing Soulstorm (though he was able to replicate his issue on his end on Dark Crusade aswell). When I boot up the game, click on multiplayer, and then on online it connects to the servers and looks fine. When he does his game gets stuck into an infinte "Connecting to servers" loop and never connects. There was initially an issue where windows defender tried to block his game but we were able to fix that. Has anyone else encountered this before? I would normally tell him to check his internet settings and such to see if that is the issue but he is mildly tech illiterate (I had to explain how to install the game), plus he is on windows 11 while I stuck to 10, which I am sure there are more differences than just UI lol.