Change freeze windows

Periods when changes are not meant to ship, flagged when someone plans one.

Settings → Change freeze

Periods when changes are not meant to ship — quarter close, a peak trading week, a migration. A window shades those dates on the Change Calendar, and anyone submitting a change that overlaps it is told so at the point of submitting.

A freeze warns by default — it does not refuse. The point is that nobody schedules into one without knowing. Whether a freeze can reject a submission outright is the Change freeze gate under Settings → Change risk — Block refuses it, Off says nothing at all — and it starts out set to warn.

Scope

A window covers one project, or every project. Scope it to a project when only that service is frozen; leave it on Every project for an organization-wide blackout such as a year-end close.

Start and end

The window runs from its start up to, but not including, its end. A change that begins exactly when a window ends is not in it, so two back-to-back windows never both claim the same moment.

The two switches

Emergency changes may still proceed — a change marked Emergency is warned about but never refused, whatever the workspace policy says. Turn it off for a hard freeze where even an Emergency has to wait.
Active — turning a window inactive keeps it on record but stops it shading the calendar and warning schedulers. Useful for a freeze that was cancelled, where deleting it would lose the fact it was ever declared.

Where it shows up

Declared windows shade the Change Calendar, and the CAB Agenda badges any change planned inside one. A freeze doesn't change a change's risk score — it's a calendar decision, not a risk signal. A window in the past is kept and listed separately rather than removed — what was frozen, and when, is part of the record.