This. A large fraction of outages are an unintended result of a planned change, so it's wise to freeze those on weeks when no one is around and sometimes other

This. A large fraction of outages are an unintended result of a planned change, so it's wise to freeze those on weeks when no one is around and sometimes other critical times (like during Black Friday sales for a shopping site). If you do this, holiday weeks are usually super quiet. My worst holiday oncall shift as a SRE was when a couple SWEs on a semi-related team didn't honor any of our best practices, instead rolling out an unannounced change during the production freeze with no premortem or rollback plan. (This was 12 years ago, and clearly the larger org had failed in communicating cultural expectations to everyone.)