what OP is complaining about is that when Heroku has an outage it says that there's an error within the client's application. I agree that it's the client's responsibility to have an up-and-running app, while the average user doesn't really care what's going on behind the scene, in this case Heroku is still giving out factually wrong and misleading information.
I can imagine users will oftentimes tell Heroku's clients to fix their app when in reality there's nothing they can do.
I don't think so. I think you're missing the point. I think the point is that there is an error in the application. Heroku is part of the application, and the customer doesn't care. If you extend your line of thinking then you could put up error messages like "We're sorry, but this gosh darn database driver has totally let us down but we didn't write it so go complain to the people who did".
what OP is complaining about is that when Heroku has an outage it says that there's an error within the client's application. I agree that it's the client's responsibility to have an up-and-running app, while the average user doesn't really care what's going on behind the scene, in this case Heroku is still giving out factually wrong and misleading information.
I can imagine users will oftentimes tell Heroku's clients to fix their app when in reality there's nothing they can do.