I see the failure to connect issue got some attention from the Cardano team a couple weeks ago (IOHK statement: connecting to network issue), however, it seems the problem is getting much worse, is no longer ‘a few users’, but rather many users.
To be clear, the error we are talking about is “Connecting to network…”. Note this can happen on an already synced computer as well as a new one.
Among other things that would be helpful (besides a fix) in the short term would be stats on network activity such as # of server nodes connected to, # packets being received.