H ave you ever encountered the cryptic WinError 10061 when trying to use Python's requests module to retrieve a web page or API data? This error is frustratingly vague, but with a few tweaks you can get past it.

What Does WinError 10061 Mean?

The full error looks something like:

requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: 
HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.example.com', port=443): 
Max retries exceeded with url: /data 
(Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x1012345>: 
Failed to establish a new connection: [WinError 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it'))

The key part is Failed to establish a new connection: [WinError 10061] . This is a Windows-specific error indicating the remote server actively refused the connection attempt.

Some common reasons this can happen:

Confirm the Server is Responding

First, confirm you have the correct URL and that the server is actually responding.

Try making the request from a browser or tool like cURL. If those fail too, there is likely an issue with the server or network.

If the URL loads fine externally, continue troubleshooting Python.

Check for Proxy or Firewall Issues

Enterprise networks sometimes interfere with Python's default HTTP handling.

Try setting proxy information in your script if required by your network:

proxies = {
  'https': 'http://10.10.1.10:3128'  
requests.get(url, proxies=proxies)

You may also need to whitelist the server's domain in firewall policies if they are blocking unauthorized connections.

Verify TLS Versions

Modern sites require TLS 1.2 or higher. If you get errors about "SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED", Python may be defaulting to an outdated TLS version:

SSLError(SSLError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:852)'),)

Specify TLS 1.2 or higher explicitly:

import requests
requests.get(url, tls.TLSVersion.TLSv1_2) 

> import socket
> socket.gethostbyname('api.example.com')
'93.184.216.34'

import logging
import http.client as http_client
http_client.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1
logging.basicConfig() 
logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
requests_log = logging.getLogger("requests.packages.urllib3")
requests_log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
requests_log.propagate = True
requests.get(url)