As someone who works for a similar large org, it's just as likely that some low level programmer put it in without much thought, and then this got surfaces to higher up people who didn't know about it and told them to remove it immediately.
Just some guy working at facebook was able to ship network code in not just one but two code-bases without any senior or higher engineers in the loop?
That's the claim? If that was true (it's not) it would be even worse than high level executives being involved.