okay solved it. i had to manually add a couple of seed-nodes. i used the following:
seed-node = 52.37.169.52:2001
seed-node = 52.26.78.244:2001
seed-node = 192.99.4.226:2001
seed-node = 46.252.27.1:1337
seed-node = 81.89.101.133:2001
seed-node = 52.4.250.181:39705
seed-node = 85.214.65.220:2001