So, nobody came to work at 6:00 AM, or, if they did, they were still drinking coffee and didn't start actually coding until 8:00?
Unlikely. Updates generally don't involve much "coding" at all.
Rather, they are likely copying all of the updated server files from a test environment to production, putting together a new installer package with all of the updated client files, and running database scripts to convert old database tables/settings/etc to new values.
Then they do a bunch of testing to verify that the expected changes are showing up and that they haven't broken anything obvious.
Most common thing to go wrong would be that some file update was overlooked and not included in the release package... causing the system to be unstable or not work at all. Then they have to go through, find what they missed, and repackage / test everything again.
All of that moving around of files and updating of databases takes time... more than enough for people to go and get multiple cups of coffee while they wait.