I had the same issue when I had a conflicting servlet-api version I was using in IntelliJ that conflicted with what was supported in Tomcat 8.0.x… I was using Maven, so I just changed my dependency to this, then did a clean deploy of my webapp and the problem went away.
<dependency>
<groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
<artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
<version>3.1.0</version>
</dependency>