In German radio news, the US correspondent explained that the weekend should still be fine, with full effects of the shutdown beginning around Monday with the new week.
For everybody else, a shutdown means you stop working right away. For most people that means the first day they’re affected is Monday because most of them have the weekend off, but people who would work on the weekend have already been affected. There’s no room for a bureaucratic delay or people failing to get the news. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for non-essential people to work during the shutdown unless their job is somehow still funded. Anyone who went to bed early on Friday and went to work on Saturday without checking the news would be told to go home.
This is not correct; for many a shutdown means you keep working entirely as normal on the understanding that when things are resolved, you'll get paid retroactively.
> In German radio news, the US correspondent explained that the weekend should still be fine, with full effects of the shutdown beginning around Monday with the new week
That's just a way of saying most (but not all) non-essential functions run on a normal workweek, so are effectively mostly “shutdown” on the weekend anyway.
They knew that, for certain, only after Friday midnight. It's not that far-fetched to assume that most people working that Saturday would already be asleep during that time and just showed up at their work on Saturday like it's business as usual.
That's just because most government services are always off on the weekend, not because of a delay. The news was distributed widely and broadly near instantly.