NextDNS Client Doesn't Process Forwarder Queries when Internet Unavailable

Business subscriber here. I have two servers running BIND hosting an internal DNS zone, internalDomain.com. Their IPs are 10.1.80.11, and 10.1.80.12.

NextDNS Client is running on two servers (10.1.128.11, and 10.1.128.12) and configured to listen on the LAN for incoming DNS queries from clients on my network.

If the DNS Zone being queried is internalDomain.com, NextDNS Client sends the request to my BIND servers for that zone as configured here:

forwarder internalDomain.com.=10.1.80.11,10.1.80.12

The problem I have is that in the event that there is an upstream problem with the NextDNS internet service or a problem with my internet connection, NextDNS will no longer handle requests that should work to my local forwarder. It is expected that any internet 3rd party hosted zones would not be resolvable, however my LAN stays up and is still reachable, yet NextDNS behavior is to stop handling all requests. This make a problem that affects my internet, into a problem that now affects my LAN too.

I propose that the NextDNS Client be improved so that in the event of a loss of connectivity to the uplink NextDNS SaaS cloud resolvers, that the client does not stop completely attempting to handle any incoming client queries if forwarders are configured, but still attempts to handle and resolve queries as configured by the user with the `forwarder` directive in the config file.

The only alternate workaround is to have my clients connect first to my BIND servers, and then configure my BIND servers to use the NextDNS Client servers as upstream resolvers for any non-local DNS zone. The issue with this deployment is that I lose the ability to report, log, and query logs by end user device / DNS client making the request on my network, which is not ideal.

Can NextDNS please implement a fix for handling forwarder defined queries when the upstream resolvers is unreachable?