recursive lookup behavior

[Joel Fisher]

Hey All,
 
I have a DNS server that I admin which serves as primary for several
domains, and we use a third party company to serve as our secondary for
these domains.  The primary server lost its network connection this
weekend.  The problem is that while the primary was down the secondary
was not responding to queries.  So external people could not reach our
website (via domain name).  Am I misunderstanding how the query happens.
Shouldn't the nameservers trying to resolve one of our records failover
to the secondary server if it can't reach the primary?
 
Thanks,
 
Joel