Did your friend do the whole name and feeding schedule thing too? My buddy did that with his starter, named it Kevin, fed it every 12 hours at the same time like clockwork. Turned out the problem was he moved it to a cold spot by the window and the poor thing basically went dormant for a week. Once he put it back near the stove it bounced back fine, so you probably didn't mess up.

Honestly the first thing I do is paste the URL into the Wayback Machine and check the calendar for a snapshot, takes like ten seconds. After that I try archive.today since it sometimes has stuff Wayback missed, and a lot of blocked articles are saved there by people overseas. Google cache used to be my go to but that thing is basically dead now sadly. Another trick is searching the headline in quotes plus the word "archive" or adding "12ft" style paywall skippers, though those break half the time. Basically never pay for a VPN just to read one page, there is almost always a free copy floating around somewhere.