The best time to deploy is the time with the best engineers at the ready. If you're updating component X, you should do so when the stakeholders of X are online. It sounds like Google was able to solve things quickly, I don't think deploying at another time would have been any better.
I'd even argue that the best time to deploy is during the best engineers' working hours. At least you guarantee they're around when/if things go bad.
And by "best", I don't mean all stars (a la Fitzpatrick, Norvig, Pike or other Google celebs), but the engineer who actually followed the whole project/patch from dev environment to production.
Absolutely, I started editing in a quip about how unscalable, even for Google, to keep engineers that both want to work on hard problems and stay up until 4am to push/support them. Best time to push, first hours I'm arriving, had a cup of joe, and have had a good night's sleep to work out any further mental bugs.
