qBittorrent official forums

Try downloading a little of a popular Linux distro torrent as a test.
If you don't get a green light in qBitTorrent on that, something is wrong!

Ok, that worked! Green light and uploading was working.

Could it be perhaps cause the other torrents I am downloading/trying to seed are from a private site?

Yes, private site torrents (which use private trackers as well) will seem to lack peers, which can make qBitTorrent seem like it's firewalled.

[quote="Switeck"]
Yes, private site torrents (which use private trackers as well) will seem to lack peers, which can make qBitTorrent seem like it's firewalled.
[/quote]

I feel there is another issue because I checked by downloading popular torrents but still had the same issue.

There may be bad networking drivers (or bad modem and/or router) that causes firewall-like issues.
Even malware can be to blame.
Many ISPs don't even give out public IPv4 addresses anymore, so those are always firewalled on regular IPv4 addresses (but possibly not on IPv6, assuming that is also available).

To get to the bottom of the problem/s, you may need a computer networking expert to do some hands-on work on your computer to determine the causes.

You can also take a note about your current configuration or backup it in %appdata% folder and then try changing settings related to connectivity (uTP,upnp,using proxy - these are in Connection, Advanced sections).
Check also Trackers tab of your idle upload torrents. May try disabling firewall temporarily (do qbt restarts acros your attempts), may try to check router configuration if upnp is allowed, check if you can port forward on router. (assuming you are not using VPN)

I am having the same issue. I set a static port on my Windows 7 box qbtorrent app. Then I forwarded the port on my verizon fios router.
canyouseeme.org sees the port as open

But qbtorrent still has a little yellow arrow at the bottom right, even when downloading ubuntu (at a painfully slow 5 kb/s)