I was seeing that too, but it looks like Amazon has now updated the availability zone status. When I run ec2-describe-availability-zones from the command line,

I was seeing that too, but it looks like Amazon has now updated the availability zone status. When I run ec2-describe-availability-zones from the command line, it's telling me that us-east-1b is impaired. (Availability zone mapping is different for each account, so my 1b may be some other availability zone for you.)