qBt shows incoming connections even though port forwarding and UpNP in the router are disabled

[lkintact]

Hi, everyone,

I have qBittorrent (ver. 5.1.2 (64-bit)) installed on my laptop (runs Windows 10 Home 22H2), which is behind a Wi-Fi router (an Asus RT-AX53U with stock firmware, I also tried a TP-Link TL-WR840N, also with stock firmware), which in turn is behind my ISP's hardware.

Today I noticed a strange thing: even though port forwarding and UPnP in the router were disabled, qBt still showed a few incoming connections (those having an I flag in the Flags column of Peers tab), and at that all the corresponding peers were outside of my LAN.

Can anybody please explain to me how that is possible? From my experience, in order to have incoming connections in a BitTorrent client in my situation I need to have either of the aforementioned features in the router enabled (and, of course, the client properly configured).

FWIW, port triggering in the router was also disabled.

(It's not that I don't want incoming connections, I'm just confused).

[PinBalldr]

I have similar problem with NO connections to QBit v5.1.0, it started this evening about 8pm, location is Florida, provider is Frontier FIOS.
BTW I tried to open EMule and it will not connect to any server. I use Surfshark VPN, and tried disconnecting it, without any luck to either program connections. Does anyone know if there has been something done to prevent file trading here? I have even tied to change my VPN connection to Canada....