Short answer: no. Long answer: there's no way to know. The names that Amazon gives a specific location aren't something you can rely on. So, your us-east-1a

Short answer: no. Long answer: there's no way to know. The names that Amazon gives a specific location aren't something you can rely on. So, your us-east-1a might be a different availability zone from my us-east-1a. I'm guessing Amazon did this to avoid everyone "going with the default" and launching instances in us-east-1a and having way more instances wanted to be launched there than their other availability zones. But it does mean that there is no way of identifying by name what the availability zone was that went down since the only names we have identify different places depending on our account.