Yep, right now Defensio‘s spam checking servers are down yet again. Luckily the Defensio plugin sticks them in the moderation queue, but that means legitimate comments are getting stuck there too. Seems like at least once a month they have downtime issues. 
325 comments in my moderation queue and counting…
We indeed had a few hickups lately. We’re about to roll out a major update to our code, which will hopefully make the service more reliable and handle more load. Thanks for your support!
Good to hear!
Keep up the overall excellent service.
Yes, this was annoying, especially if you have email notices of stuff that hits the moderation queue…
We launched our new code yesterday. Hope it works well for you guys!
Carl Mercier on July 11th, 2008 at 1:50 PM wrote:
It’s not so far. When I try and process the spam from during the downtime, I get “There was an error connecting to Defensio. Please try again later.” Odd that it worked for a little bit shortly after the downtime but is refusing to work now.
Everything is fine on our end. Make sure you’re not pointing directly to the IP address as it changed. You must connect to api.defensio.com. If it doesn’t work, please send us an email.
Carl Mercier on July 11th, 2008 at 8:24 PM wrote:
I haven’t modified the plugin at all. I’ll debug and see what I can find.