IPFS No swarm peers when deployed on EC2

Question

Setting up an IPFS DApp using Express-Node on AWS EC2 instance running NGINX.

I keep on getting an empty list on ipfs swarm peers despite having a non-empty ipfs bootstrap list and an active daemon. I've used nc and checked that port 4001/tcp is open to public connections, and edited the security policy to allow outbound connections on 5001 and 8080. When I run the same code on my local machine, the ipfs swarm peers returns the expected list of peers.

Not sure how to get the ipfs swarm peers to successfully connect to other peers and upload my files onto the ipfs network.