The front-end of the mine77 pool is alive again (was stalled for 24 hours). Payouts have resumed as well. The pool itself was apparently running all the time, as previously suspected. Good thing is that hash power is now shared kind of 50/50 between mine77 and irdpool. I'd happily move some workers to the third pool (ird.uvac) as well once it allows fixed share diffculty setting. The other two pools have this feature, even though it is undocumented on their "getting started" pages.