Probably by the time you read this it will all be fixed, but its been going on for a while now, not sure how much its affecting mining or just access to the web sites.
To most folks, it's probably just the website, out of nearly 200 gears I got running on Viabtc only 2 switched to the secondary pool because they were rebooted by awesomeminer for having "sick asics", the rest are unaffected and 0 seconds time on the backup pools.
The miners that switched to the secondary pools now showing Viabtc "dead", it will probably go away if I reboot them but I want to see what happens, so my guess is that if the miner wasn't rebooted during these DNS issues -- no issues, someone who runs a pool like Kano probably knows what could have been the problem, why are the previously connected miners running fine, and the ones that are negotiating for a new connection aren't.
Anyway, one should always be prepared for such a scenario, the back pool needs to be in a different geographical location.