https://bugs.openldap.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372

--- Comment #2 from Nadezhda Ivanova nivanova@symas.com --- I wasn't able to reproduce this issue in 2.5 - failover worked for me both with -j DROP and when back-end ldap service was stopped.

Based on the described behavior, there was some issue during initial bind of a connection that was fixed in the 9 since then, or it was a misconfiguration.