Boy, do I hate it when I encounter stuff like that. I always try to explain to people that being "online" is not a boolean flag: at most you know that your last

Boy, do I hate it when I encounter stuff like that. I always try to explain to people that being "online" is not a boolean flag: at most you know that your last request to your crappy heartbeat service have failed. That's it. You can display a small hint on the UI ("It seems that there's a problem with your connection"), but only an idiot would block users from interacting with the app on grounds of "being offline".