The situation appears to have improved with the retry, but has not fully resolved. The cronjob retries and succeeds quickly enough now that we see failing pods removed.

At this time, the error definitely qualifies as weird (notice the failure here https://prow.ci.openshift.org/view/gs/origin-ci-test/logs/periodic-ci-openshift-release-master-ci-4.10-e2e-gcp-upgrade/1493301582970753024 happening during an upgrade with no obvious reason for a failure)

I don't consider a blocker at this time, but correcting this in 4.11 or devoting the effort fix the test to unblock the org is important.