Why a 'spontaneous' switch to offline mode ?

[Rich]

This is a corporate e-mail account.

Why does Outlook switch to offline mode spontaneously with no
warning/indication?

Does this have to do with some kind of periodic process that fails and then
sets the mode to offline silently?

This is regularly causing me to miss important inbound e-mail and delaying
outbound (with NO indication) sends.

 

[Rich]

Apparently this might be due to an implicit synchronization that failed.
Toggling Outlook to Offline doesn't make any sense. Is there anyway to get
it to flag the problem instead of hiding the problem?