According to ICANN WHOIS, the registration directory maintained by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a registration update was made on 12/11/2018. They are supposed to be seamless, but registration updates are a bear and they often wreck havoc on a website. Last year, Google did maintenance on their domain registry and my domain was messed up for days. Couldn't receive or send email. Fortunately, your friend was able to recover relatively quickly. Since he doesn't charge for his services, he didn't experience lost revenue. Still, I'd ask for a refund of a day's worth of hosting fees just to teach them a lesson.