I used to work at FB and the huge, open offices were one of my least favourite parts about the job. I worked in the London office for a year and that was actually a little better because it's smaller and generally quieter there, but the three years that I did in the Menlo Park offices were not particularly fun for all the reasons described. It's very difficult to concentrate when there's constant background noise. Mercifully, all the teams I worked with were based in the old Sun campus rather than the new warehouse style Gehry building across the road - I'm told that the noise and general foot traffic in the new offices was at times completely unbearable. There were a huge number of pot plants, whiteboards and other makeshift obstacles used to try and block paths between desks there, both to block out noise and to channel foot traffic away from groups of people fed up with being disturbed.
The worst thing of all (in my opinion) is the fact that the open office culture is simply accepted there as being the best thing for all concerned. It's like a theory that cannot be challenged. The introverts basically don't get listened to, while the extroverts can sing and dance with happiness. This surprised me greatly because anyone who's worked at FB will tell you that it's a hugely data-driven company - lots of people did try a great many times to suggest that we should trial team-sized offices or at least something different to the status quo, even providing studies and statistics to back up their hypotheses, but the requests always fell on deaf ears. I'm not sure it was ever taken seriously as a concern despite numerous articles like this being linked internally and debated ad infinitum. It's a real shame, as the company was a pretty great place to work on most other levels.