App Engine taskqueue madness

[Mars]

Since about 10 minutes ago, I start seeing a lot of  DeadlineExceededError in the log, which is then followed by thousands of task queued. I use deferred in my code, but it never generates that many tasks in one go. I'm not exactly sure what's going on and was forced to pause the task queue to prevent the scheduler to launch hundreds of instances. Is anyone else having the same problem? 

[Mars]

Now it's just 503 (including the dashboard). Guess someone's working hard fixing the issue. Will wait for the post mortem then. Thanks.