Community Goals are the easiest places to find other players.

That’s not 7,600 in the last 24 hours, it’s a 24hr peak of 7,600 concurrent players - at 8:50pm UTC according to SteamDB.info.

SteamSpy estimates 83k players during this past fortnight.

If you lost 400m in rebuys due to the bugged NPC loadouts on 2.1's release, then you automatically get refunded in-game: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-03-elite-dangerous-latest-expansion-caused-ai-spaceships-to-unintentionally-create-super-weapons