SON Downtime: The SONs might stop functioning or go into maintenance. We should provide a mechanism to the SONs to announce any planned maintenance so that the community knows about it. In any case, the maximum continuous downtime allowed for an SON will be 12 hours (This should be a chain parameter). If the downtime exceed 12 hours, the SON will be deregistered. During the downtime, the SON will not be able to sign any transactions. If more than 1/3rd SONs are not able to sign the bitcoin transactions, the pending transaction go into wait mode as described in BTC Transaction Processing & Signing. Once the required number of active SONs reaches required threshold, queued transactions will be signed and processed.
Similarly, if 2/3rdsmore SONs are down, the incoming bitcoin transactions can't be published on the Peerplays blockchain and the funds cannot be accepted. In this scenario, transactions will also enter a pending state in which they will await the required number of active SONs.