Did Opera get hacked or leaked 1.7M users data to Chinese giants?

Imagine a browser company getting hacked, losing all your sync passwords and coming up with an explanation like “The total active number of users of Opera sync in the last month is 1.7 million, less than 0.5% of the total Opera user base of 350 million people.” So yes, Opera got hacked and it has affected 1.7 million users, might be a small case of user base to giants but to people their bank passwords, social security accounts, email passwords, most of all their privacy was breached.

Further clearing up the mess Opera on its blog quoted, “Although we only store encrypted (for synchronized passwords) or hashed and salted (for authentication) passwords in this system, we have reset all the Opera sync account passwords as a precaution. We have also sent emails to all Opera sync users to inform them about the incident and ask them to change the password for their Opera sync accounts.”

Hearing this there was a chaos at their blog with people questioning the policies and what they’ll do to recover this mess. One of the users wrote, “I realise that this is a standard modern style of apology, but I'd rather you didn't equivocate. When 1.7 million people need to reset at least one password, there's no doubt that this has caused inconvenience, so you can remove the "might" from your apology.”

While another one came up with some facts, “When the new Opera Sync was created, people were very concerned that the data was not internally encrypted with a password from the user.
You didn't really see it as an issue, as it was only internal data. It is still properly encrypted when transferring to/from the browser to Operas servers, was your argument.”

Maybe they gave it away as a part of deal

According to Reuters (July 18th), “A $1.2 billion takeover of Opera Software by a group of Chinese internet firms fell through on Monday after failing to get regulatory approval in time, sending the Norwegian browser firm's shares to a seven-month low.”

Opera and the Chinese group had instead come up with an alternative deal worth $600 million which strips out some products and services in a bid to overcome regulatory hurdles.

The so-called Kunqi consortium, which includes online and mobile games distributor Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co, will now buy certain parts of Opera's consumer business. Now, this was news a month ago

The opera privacy policies states that user data may be given "in connection" with a business acquisition.

So, here we are at the end, asking questions if it’s safe to store passwords on a cloud service. Or are we being the apples on heads to shoot.