Garmin is notoriously tight lipped. They issued a statement saying they didn't directly pay the group.

An article I read suggested the money may have been paid by their insurance. That idea raises more questions than it answers.

As a company, Garmin has been extremely profitable for years. I wonder if that will change. I know a lot of people considered Connect a fully safe place to store data, like Google or Microsoft. We all assumed they must have redundant backups etc. And this has definitely called that assumption into question. Judging from this thread, it's split whether users care about long term storage at Connect, but most people were annoyed at having to manually upload to Strava.