Yes, that also means they had backups since the original outage but they were slow. Since they had backups they should never have paid for even slow decryption

Yes, that also means they had backups since the original outage but they were slow. Since they had backups they should never have paid for even slow decryption and, as you said, potential other security issues using the hackers software. So my reading of the situation is that the situation was urgent, backups were too slow, so they paid to try to have a quick fix only to have the description also be very slow. Paying might have been a complete waste of money. I could be wrong about my reading of events, but as I said originally, they lacked rapid recovery capabilities, which for something this critical is just as important as having the backups themselves.