My validator is offline! What do I do?

Don't Panic!

The penalty for missing attestations is exactly the same as the reward for a successful one. Any downtime penalty will be recovered in the same amount of uptime.

Proposing a block is rare. Depending on the size of the validator pool, a single validator will on average only propose a block every few months. If you are unlucky enough to be offline at the time that your validator is asked to propose a block, that's also ok.

The Ethereum network is robust and designed to handle these situations. If you miss your block proposal, the slot that should have contained your block will be empty. Other than the lost rewards from missing the block proposal, there are no penalties or slashing that occurs from a missed block proposal.

If you have a large number of validators or want to minimize your downtime, consider running a second consensus and execution client pair and adding this endpoint to your already running validator client. This will ensure that if one of your client pairs goes down, your validator client will automatically fallback to the other one.

Doing this is a supported function by all validator client software as each client has slashing protections to ensure that you do not attest twice, so you will not get you slashed.

Do not however, configure a second validator service. By doing so your risk of slashing goes up massively. You should only ever have your validator keys in one place at any one time. Missing out on a few days of rewards may seem bad at the time, but getting slashed and bleeding ETH while you wait out the 5 week exit period post-slashing is a lot worse!

Having a second consensus-execution clients is great, but having a second validator client is not.