The IP address of solo.ckpool.org changes after a DDoS and perhaps these devices almost never look up the IP address using a cached result for ages. In which case a restart might be required, either of cgminer or the whole device.
I have restarted the whole device 3 times (one of those was power off for 20+ minutes) and it still is in failover, I'll see if I can't flush its dns cache or something, thanks.
I had the same bug a couple of weeks back, all I had to do was change the address I was mining to.
I could not locate any sort of dns reset in the S3 interface so I tried changing addresses and the pool was ALIVE again. I changed back to the old address thinking maybe I had cleared up the issue, but the old address reports the pool as DEAD. A new solo address for the US node it is then! Problem solved, thanks.