Here's what happens when you press the Get Some button on the Faucet and it sends you coins:
+ A Google App Engine task is scheduled to actually do the send.
+ The send tasks are (currently) scheduled to run at most once per minute, so huge spikes in demand for coins from the faucet are smoothed out.
The nice thing about App Engine tasks is that they're persistent little buggers-- they'll keep going until they succeed. If the send fails for some reason (I need to restart bitcoind for some reason, or the connection between the Google and my bitcoind server is down), App Engine will reschedule the task to try again after an hour.
So, you were probably just very unlucky and the send failed twice in a row, OR you on the tail end of a couple hundred people all asking for coins at about the same time (the faucet will service a maximum of 120 requests in two hours).