Holidays are a good time for a company to do a risky deployment, but a bad time for an individual employee to do a risky deployment, assuming one doesn't want to work overtime over the holiday fixing things.
It broke, which was a major problem, this meant that senior management were being phoned (ho), and relatively high middle managers were on site to deal with the fall out. Of course most suppliers were also closed so everything was harder to fix.
There's good reasons not to do changes when places are closed, or at least skeletoned, for 2 weeks.