What happens to your rewards if a pool goes offline?

You miss a share of one epoch’s rewards, and that’s only for blocks that were missed. If the pool had no blocks assigned during that period there will be no impact at all. This graceful degradation is part of the reason that Cardano’s staking model is so robust.

Your ADA stays where it is throughout, for the reasons we set out earlier.

Rewards are worked out epoch by epoch from the blocks a pool actually made, and each epoch starts again from nothing. No penalty, no lock-up, nothing to claw back.

Therefore, after six years of running these pools, and given the effort that goes into configuration management, patching, latency, uninterruptible power, operations and security monitoring, failover and testing upgrades, why do we miss blocks at all?

The primary reason is that a node has to pause every so often to tidy up its own memory and write its state to disk. For a long time those pauses could land on the exact second a block was due. Operators traded notes on it for years and the node releases improved, which meant that as we upgraded and tuned the memory settings, the problem became almost imperceptible against ordinary block production.

We keep a close eye on ours: two missed between them in the last sixty epochs, out of more than fifteen thousand they were given. For anyone delegating with us, that means the answer to this question is almost always that nothing happened at all.