We cannot justify having miners wasting time on a pool unable to find blocks. The pool will be down until we absolutely positively verify that nothing technically prevents the pool from finding blocks. Shares will be retained of course.

That's perfectly ok. It means that the pool has detected a new block on the blockchain and instructs all miners to switch work to the new block.

Sure I can elaborate. It's called PPLNS for a reason. To understand what happened to your shares take a look a round 5 here. PPLNS tolerates miner's stopping to mine at a pool to a certain degree. If the round is long, or nightmarish long as our last one was, the oldest shares won't get included. It would work the same way with any other pool using the same payout scheme.

It's up again. We've migrated some service to an addtional server to take load off the share processing server. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

We just did.

It's up again. We've migrated some service to an addtional server to take load off the share processing server. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

@Funkyminer: Both the Dash pool and to a degree the Mona pool regulary find blocks and the miners get paid the instant the coinbase tx reaches the mandatory 100 confirmations. All payments are visible both at the pool's payments tab and on the blockchain.  We are working our ass off to provide a stable and pleasent mining experience for everyone, but we cannot force luck. Neither can we magically force hashpower on the underperforming pools.

Are we talking about the Monero Pool?

Your balance is updated when we find the next block. Please read https://poolmining.org/faq.

To answer that I would first need to know your definition of "round". In my point of view we are always on the "current" round.