Microsoft is currently on a holiday lockdown for Bing, Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat. Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO, Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, wrote on X, “Holiday lockdown doesn’t help (we reduce production changes at this period, because so many people are on vacation).”

This is not uncommon, most companies do not want to release big or even small changes to a very active production environment when there are resource limitations or staff shortages. In my company, we try not to push releases on Fridays so we don’t have to deal with potential issues on weekends.

Also, when staff is on vacation, there is only so much that you can get done.

With the holiday season here, a lot of people take off now, which means less being released over this timeframe.

Here is that post from Mikhail Parakhin:

Working on all of the above. Holiday lockdown doesn’t help (we reduce production changes at this period, because so many people are on vacation).

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) December 17, 2023

Here are some examples of rollouts that are waiting to go live until after the holidays:

I know, annoys me, too. We have the fix, vacation time, don’t want to push it out until after the holidays.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) December 19, 2023

Should not be happening. We are checking: our volume is quite a bit, even in this holiday time, maybe it gets overloaded.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) December 19, 2023

Hope some of you are able to slow down and take off some time during this season.

Forum discussion at X.