At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was told, no, that's inexcusable.
That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.
When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller company. They made the decision around pushing videos before this code was written, because of the engagement of videos on Facebook and Instagram.
Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.