In our B2B environment we pretty much have to do weekends. Our clients have little system usage during this time and I am more secure knowing we have more time to recover.
I will tell you, though, that weekend updates are planned ahead of time and schedules adjusted to ensure no one is caught off guard.
I once worked in a company that planned releases for late Friday afternoon. Not only were the vast majority of our (primarily B2B) customers more concerned with their weekends, but if things did go wrong, we could revert to our old version and spend Friday evening debugging the failure/pushing the release again.
Sounds like a pretty crappy thing for morale, hey? Thing is, it wasn't - we used to turn the Friday push into a bit of a party and when we had to stay Friday evenings, we'd take the next Friday off. All in all, some of the best experiences I have ever had in technology were at those Friday afternoon push parties (or alternatively, the Friday evening 'can we please fix this and go home' sessions)...
I agree. you can get around the skeleton crew issue by asking everyone to be at hand, nearby in case shit hits the fan. no biggie if all take turns manning the update.
I will tell you, though, that weekend updates are planned ahead of time and schedules adjusted to ensure no one is caught off guard.