Overnight retardation causes gluten strength to drop dramatically? (updated with the resulting mess:))
I've been on a sourdough roll, until this morning. I'm being ambitious and trying to bake a Pain Poilane type sourdough bread. An option in the recipe was to retard the bulk fermentation to 12-16 or so hours by refrigeration. I chose to do that (doing about 3 stretch-and-folds till 10PM yesterday), for a total 16 hours bulk ferment. When I left the dough in the fridge at 10PM, it was really strong, almost like hard rubber bands, and I was super happy. This morning, the dough had just about doubled, but all the strength is gone, it's runny now. I'm now trying to resuscitate it with stretch-and-folds. I'm hoping that it comes back, cross fingers.
Is this normal with long fermentation times? Is it ok to stretch-and-fold after ferment but before proofing if bulk ferment was too long? Or did I overwork/over-stretch-and-fold the dough yesterday and kill all that strength, or make some other mistake?
Thanks for the help!