Hi, throughout the year I have been experiencing an extremely difficult and irritating problem when joining friends online in Minecraft Bedrock Edition.

• I have all privacy settings checked to allow multiplayer connectivity.
• My NAT type is open, my Xbox Live connectivity is connected, my firewall is on.
• Minecraft is enabled on my firewall within inbound connections by default.
• I have restarted my router, restarted my PC, and used mobile data to test if it is my network or device. 

All of this and I still have problems connecting to my friend's worlds.

I have tried everything that has been recommended to me, even signing out of Xbox Live and signing back in. I have spent 8 hours in total trying to troubleshoot and fix the problem. If I am lucky, I manage to join my friend for about a week with no problems, they can't join me though, not at all, even after the procedures. I have found that if my friend launches Minecraft first and loads into the world, I have to then launch Minecraft and then I will be able to join. - This is our process or procedure, it has been working for over a week, until today. I wanted to play with friends today and somehow it stopped working completely. It was working fine yesterday, with our procedure, only I could join my friend. I also found out that: If I do our process and play in my friend's world, if my friend decides to change worlds and I try to join, it will not let me connect, it will say "Unable to connect to world". We then have to redo our process and it works fine, until today. I tried the whole process for about 2 hours now and nothing. We both decided to use mobile data and nothing worked, we both checked all settings, restarted our PC's, the whole lot of troubleshooting, and still nothing. I got frustrated and decided to report this. 

Hopefully I will be able to receive some help, this has been an ongoing issue for me that only gets fixed sometimes if I'm lucky, which proves, that it is not mine or my friend's device, network or settings causing the issues. It has to either be a bug or an issue with Minecraft or Xbox services and its networking.