Without knowing what happened, I can only guess that the database was injured. I have spreadsheets that have every stories earnings by day. The one from Jan 7 (when the first implied catch-ups came) shows earnings from unusually old stories that never were popular. That happens sometimes, but there were enough of those to imply Medium has to reconstruct a LOT of data.

That would take a lot of time. I still have stories that had reads, comments, etc., Jan 6 through Jan 8 but no earnings posted, so it’s not fixed yet. Stupid of them not to tell us that!