"Merge mining was stopped due to some issues with them. There is no ETA on the date of restoration."
welp.. back to my failover pool, i'll check back in a while as this was pretty much the only reason I was here... i sure liked all the different coin options, but without the ability to merge mine it doesn't suit my needs..
I've enabled merged mining on us1 again, everything seems to be working fine now. I'll enable it on the other stratums in a few hours, once i can make sure its working as expected.