I run a large dev service with multiple online products, and we like most others in the industry go into a deployment freeze from about mid december to the first week in jan. Its designed to prevent new code that could cause stability issues being deployed over the holiday spell when many of our top engineers are on vacation, and our ability to handle complex problems is limited.<p>We (and i assume google does the same) restrict deployments to 911 fixes, which have a specific set of conditions before a fix is considered such, presumably this did not meet googles criteria. From what i read it was 6% of a minority browser traffic that was effected, which would would putt the total traffic at 1-2%, i would not break the deployment embargo for that.