Autopayout was set to 100k since Friday 13.12, this has nothing to do with each other.
It did reduce server-load a lot, but we lowered it Saturday to see how everything worked. It worked good until this sunday, when simply the amount of workers killed the system.
Thats why we changed it back to 100k today.
Auto payout set to 100k all of sudden and now pool's hacked?
I don't want to be the one to say scam, but kind of weird, no?
I think all you can take from this is to learn. Instead of trying to eek everything out to the absolute limit enforce auto payouts at sensible level. halt registrations when you can clearly see the server is about to buckle (it was running like shit over an hour before it finally went down).
I wouldnt bother bringing this pool back on personally, however this hack went off no one will trust it again im afraid.