Hmm. Is the Disqus plugin capable of automatically falling back to native Wordpress commenting in the case of Disqus down? If so, the authors need not panic even if Disqus down.
But what if the service goes down during the night time where I might not be able to immediately login to my wordpress and disable the Disqus plug-in until next morning?
Wouldn't be nice if the plug-in automatically takes care of itself, rather than manual intervention?