EC2 Acting Up? Instances not showing up in describe after being launched

There have been a bunch of posts lately about EC2 being over saturated. The latest issue I have run into is running an instance via ec2-run-instances, it returning successfully, but no new instances showing up in ec2-describe-instances. The instance eventually shows up in ec2-describe-instances about 10 minutes later, up and running. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce this easily and the actual code which handles this is buried deep in some layers so I don't know what ec2-run-instances is returning (it appears to be returning something valid though). I also don't feel like trying to bring up instances until one fails unless Amazon wants to reimburse me. Anyone else noticed this?