Many networks do. It’s common in Telecoms to freeze network changes during holidays.
During a Network Freeze, few maintenance activities are scheduled.
A freeze is smart when so many people are out of the office OOTO. Not only your own support staff but vendors and service providers, too.
Any outage caused by a planned maintenance activity is bad. But an outage worsened by a lack of support staff can really hurt your career. So don’t do that.
The freeze is announced by the Network Head weeks in advance and again when the freeze starts. Other departments know their pet projects won’t make progress in the network during the freeze.
A freeze covers major holidays: Christmas & NewYear, Ramadan; LunarNewYear; GoldenWeek in Japan; Songkran in Thailand; August in Europe. Any time many of the staff are OOTO.
During a network freeze, Technical staff works even harder than normal to avoid outages. Mostly by not messing with the kit.
What holidays cause your network to freeze? Leave me a comment with your freeze periods.
With so many people OOTO, the pace can seem a little slower. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to keep warm during a freeze.
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