Timed out waiting for SPI char

Hi,
I have strange issue with code running on Adafruit MatrixPortal M4.
At some point of time it just stopped working. Maybe a year or so there were no problems at all.
All I see it's the 'Timed out waiting for SPI char' when I do a call via requests.get to get a json.
I upgraded to the latest CircuitPython 9.1.1 and Nina 1.7.7 with no luck to solve it.

Here is debug log:
*** Get host by name
*** Get socket
Allocated socket #0
*** Socket connect mode 2
*** Open socket to hostname 443 2
*** Closing socket #0
TimeoutError
ESP32 not responding
Timed out waiting for SPI char

What else can I check?

Start with the reported requests.get call on the Adafruit MatrixPortal M4 and reproduce the debug sequence showing socket allocation, connection, and the SPI timeout. Check the behavior with CircuitPython 9.1.1 and Nina 1.7.7; done means identifying the cause of “ESP32 not responding” or documenting the next diagnostic step.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.