This means that App Engine timed out waiting for an instance to be available to serve your request. Some cases when this can happen:
- An app with manual scaling configured to run a fixed number of instances, which serve long running requests. I recently saw these errors showing up on an app which had one backend instance that served requests that were usually fast but sometimes took up to an hour to complete. If it received enough slow requests at once, all its threads would be tied up, causing all further requests to time out with the "Request was aborted after waiting too long" error.
- An app which takes a while to start up and suddenly receives a lot of traffic. If not all the incoming requests can be handled by existing instances, some will be queued as new instances start up, and will time out unless enough new instances start up quickly enough.
I'll contact you out of band to request app details so I can take a look.
Regards,
Phil