Thanks for your reply.
I ended up (accidentally) solving the issue.
On a whim I decided to create an instance of the app with more cpu, memory, and hard disk space and it seemed to fix the issue. I retested multiple times using more and less powerful server configurations. I was able to get consistent functionality only with the more powerful configurations. The less powerful ones always failed.
Chalk it up to a rookie mistake. For anyone else in the future running into this kind of issue, try giving React more resources!