The world is filled with stupid routers, which kill all connections that have no activity for a while (even a very short while). I keep loosing my SSH sessions because of this. To fix it, I added a clock in my GNU screen bar:

hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"

For the record, my entire .screenrc:

multiuser on
caption always "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
vbell off
startup_message off
term linux
hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"