I have followed the helloword tutorial on http://kubernetes.io/docs/hellonode/.
When I run:
kubectl run hello-node --image=gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/hello-node
I had this problem using a local docker. The thing to do is check the logs of the containers its spins up to figure out what went wrong. For me it transpired that etcd had fallen over
$ docker logs
2016-06-15 09:02:32.868569 C | etcdmain: listen tcp 127.0.0.1:7001: bind: address already in use
Aha! I'd been playing with Cassandra in a docker container and I'd forwarded all the ports since I wasn't sure which it needed exposed and 7001 is one of its ports. Stopping Cassandra, cleaning up the mess and restarting it fixed things.