Unless our colleagues in Marketing went through and deleted all of the empty categories, this is not the result of an editor manually doing this as it would be a huge task to delete all of them!
It has to have been caused by something else (i.e. a bug soemwhere), regardless of when it happened. It's simply too big a task to have been done by someone and then forgotten about. I have no idea where to start but I will try and pinpoint (If I can) when this might have happened. Sadly the DL History option doesn't record the creation or removal of categories.
Unless our colleagues in Marketing went through and deleted all of the empty categories, this is not the result of an editor manually doing this as it would be a huge task to delete all of them!
It has to have been caused by something else (i.e. a bug soemwhere), regardless of when it happened. It's simply too big a task to have been done by someone and then forgotten about. I have no idea where to start but I will try and pinpoint (If I can) when this might have happened. Sadly the DL History option doesn't record the creation or removal of categories.