This is not about logged in or offline. Facebook is giving fairly precise technical information about what happened. The New York Times is being as coy as poss

This is not about logged in or offline. Facebook is giving fairly precise technical information about what happened. The New York Times is being as coy as possible, using obfuscating language, to ensure it's readers do not understand what happened but assume the worst. The reality is that Facebook allowed me to send messages from within Spotify, when and if I agreed to grant that access to Spotify. That's the baseline.