Did you know that Amazon includes status messages about the health of availability zones in the output of the ec2-describe-availability-zones command, the associated API call, and the AWS console?
Right now, Amazon is restoring power to a “large number of instances” in one availability zone in the us-east-1 region due to “electrical storms in the area”.
Since the names used for specific availability zones differ between AWS accounts, Amazon can’t just say that the affected zone is us-east-1c as it might be us-east-1e in another account.
During this outage, you can find out what the name of the affected availability zone is in your AWS account by running this command (installation instructions):