I've been unable to find any background on this issue. After digging into the spark logs, I've also found a reference to a GC issue. More specifically:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:3332) at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.ensureCapacityInternal(AbstractStringBuilder.java:124) at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.append(AbstractStringBuilder.java:448) at java.lang.StringBuilder.append(StringBuilder.java:136) ..

I should note this is a simple object declaration. No data is being processed by the culprit cell.