Well I'm just reporting the reality that the keyservers are down when I want to use them, almost without fail.
I suspect that gpg isn't trying multiple servers in the pool but only trying the first A record it finds. I've had to edit hosts to select a functioning key server in the pool many times.
Before I learned about the SKS Keyservers pool, I had my "keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu" in my ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf, and that never failed for me unless I was in a strangely firewalled environment. Maybe try that?
I suspect that gpg isn't trying multiple servers in the pool but only trying the first A record it finds. I've had to edit hosts to select a functioning key server in the pool many times.