Scoble makes the impact of spam more clear: the spam blocker used by WordPress blogs is down right now, and that means that WordPress bloggers are getting buried:

The problem is that bloggers who don’t use Wordpress.com blogs mostly don’t see this as an issue. It’s a HORRIBLE issue here when Akismet isn’t doing its job. Since I’ve started using Wordpress.com Akismet has blocked more than 64,000 spams.

My spam solution is built into my blog, which means I'm unlikely to have this specific problem (I have different ones though - maintaining the code for it being the primary one). The tragedy is that you can't really get by without some kind of anti-spam solution. While Akismet is down, the simplest answer for affected users is to turn comments and trackbacks off. Might be overkill, but it's probably better than spending all your waking hours deleting spam.