Medium has never been a profitable company. They said when they announced they hit a million paid members a month or so ago that they were on the cusp of profitability. To me, this tells me there's something going on in the background that's preventing payments. Angering your members to the point that they will leave would just send that profitability goal back to being a dream.

So for now, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt. It could be some kind of bug happening in the back end of the system, something with Stripe, maybe they're reviewing data due to the mass amounts of members saying earnings were way lower, or maybe the holiday messed them up. Time will tell and life goes on...