Effectively there was a proposed Swiss Law that would force Protonmail to cooperate in sharing customer data with authorities if requested.
The law hasn't passed, and it was even deemed illegal by the EU.
It did raise an interesting issue though, as Protomail was strictly in Switzerland, they realised that they were at the whim of their lawmakers (which was kinda the point in the first place as Switzerland has great privacy laws). However, if those laws did become adversarial, it would greatly affect Protonmail users. This is why they started diversifying some services outside of Switzerland, in case something like this ever did come to pass.
They lost thousands of emails and they treated every customer individually while blocking people from complaining on their subreddit.
Then, it was posted here on HN and they finally decided to stand up and fix their reputation by saying they care and want to do better, after months of silencing the issue as much as possible.
