... Failover when a sub-pool crashes takes about 4-6 seconds to kick in, meaning you can point your miners at one IP and it will automatically put them at an internal pool. ...
So it sounds like you are collapsing the multiple names (uswest, useast, uscentral) down to a single address with multiple servers behind it. If this is the case, please post the DNS name of this "one IP" as soon as possible so that we can get our miners reconfigured. (And point that DNS somewhere useful in the meantime... )
Thanks for the hard work.
When the new server is ready, all the US pool DNS entries will be pointed towards the new pool. 24 hours after that happens, I will shut off the other pools (US East and US Central). I will post the IP for manual pointing if your computer has an error with resolving the name (DNS caching gone awry).
Regarding today's huge number of issues: I just finished filtering out large portions of the networks that were attacking the servers today. Mostly they were hitting DE1/DE2, but the rules are now on all servers. If you ended up getting caught in the ban, send me a PM or a support email with your IP address and I'll whitelist you.
I know these problems were terrible today, but this is the same kind of attack DeepBit had to deal with a few weeks ago. The problem with DDoS prevention is that mining looks a LOT like a DDoS, especially when a server is having connection trouble. Standard DDoS filtering techniques will end up having an obscene number of false positive bans on a pool server.