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No, they are not. I know at least one Kiwi who worked remotely for Github from New Zealand.

No. But this appears to now be the most important online shopping week of the year in all of Europe as well. Shops are abnormally sensitive to outages. You'd expect all kinds of service providers to be extremely conservative with code and config pushes this week due to that. Maybe GitHub is far enough removed from the actual consumers that they don't feel the pressure, but it does seem surprising.

If a good chunk of them are, it's still good to do a code freeze. If %30-90 of your company is on holiday, not a good time to do major things.