I had to force a restart of the backend pool.
Everyone will have failed over to their backup pool at 03:18 UTC
Pool is back up and working OK, hash rate heading back up to where it was before the restart.
Mine on

What backup pools do people recommend?
I suppose this doesn't make much sense, does it?
stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:3333
stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:443
stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:8080
Well you just need one at the bottom of the list pointing somewhere else, for the very rare occasion when this happens.
In reality it's never more than a few minutes outage when I restart the backend - but if you want to have the miner always going even when this happens, then yeah you need another pool at the bottom of the list in your miner web page.
Since it's always quite a short outage, your best bet would be to use a PPS pool as your final failover.
This way you get rewarded for all shares you submit, even if it is lower than you'd expect at a non-PPS pool, and since it is very short, your guaranteed to still be rewarded for that short period of time.