Getting "Transaction has been aborted. Please retry." Far Too Often

after seeing the above error for some time, it looks like dgraph died → Mar 22 20:43:26 dev-dgraph-master-03.c.charlotte-161616.internal docker[1431]: 2018/03/22 20:43:26 pool.go:168: Echo error from dev-dgraph-master-01:7080. Err: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = all SubConns are in TransientFailure