Disqus JS not showing approved comments

[scriptster]

Hi, I'm a moderator of a forum so I can see the comments via both the front end (JS on site) and the backend (moderation interface on disqus.com)
I left three comments today. Two of them do not appear on the site. I know they exist, approved, not deleted etc. because they are still available via API calls and therefore render locally. But, once JS loads, it seems to be unable to to find them on Disqus and wipes out the content of the  

disqus_thread div. 

I was only able to catch it because I posted the comments myself and went looking for them. But it would be a very scary 
prospect if this can happen to other user's comments - they would not show up and I would not even know something's amiss.

So, my question is two fold:

1. Do these hiccups happen and is this something of a temporary Disqus content delivery or other similar issue
2. How to prevent Disqus JS from replacing the content of disqus_thread in such cases when there's already locally rendered
comments there and JS finds nothing to replace them with. 

Thank you for your comments and suggestions!