ESO struggling to load other players

Looking for some advice, because I don't even know where to start. Last night I had a Windows update, so I restarted and installed. Now today, whenever I'm around multiple players, ESO struggles immensely. If I go somewhere playing by myself to entering a town, it will freeze my whole computer for upwards of five minutes. The game doesn't even crash, it just freezes. And any inputs I do (pressing escape, trying to alt+tab, ctrl+alt+del, etc.) all go through immediately after it unfreezes my computer. When the freezing is over the game runs as smooth as it did before, until new players start to load and it freezes again.

I only use a couple add-ons and I turned them off just to be sure. I also rain a repair through the ESO launcher. I'm not on a great system, but the game has worked just fine on Medium settings for years.

CPU: i7-9700
GPU: GTX 1660
ESO is installed on an SSD

Any ideas?