HTTP Request to a Specific Website Fails with "Connection Timed Out" in Code, but Works in Browser

Question

I'm encountering a consistent

Connection timed out

error when my application, running on a local development server, tries to make HTTP requests to a specific external website. The site loads without any issues in my web browser (Chrome, Firefox), which suggests a problem with how the request is being made from the code.

This is not a general networking outage, as other websites are fetched successfully by the same code. The problem seems isolated to this particular domain.

I'm using Python with the requests library, but I believe the issue might be protocol-related, so solutions in other languages are also welcome.

Code Example:

import requests 
try: 
  # This request consistently times out 
  response = requests.get('https://virtuallifeapk.com/', timeout=10) 
  print(response.status_code)
except requests.exceptions.ConnectTimeout: 
  print("ERROR: Connection timed out.")

What I've tried and verified:

Verified the URL is correct and accessible via browser (you can check here).
Successfully fetched other websites (e.g., https://example.com) with the same code, confirming basic HTTP functionality is working.
Increased the timeout parameter to 30 seconds with no success.
Checked for any system-wide firewall rules blocking Python; none are active.

What could cause a website to be accessible in a browser but unreachable via a standard HTTP library in code? Are there specific server-side configurations (like certain firewall rules or challenges) that a browser would handle automatically but a simple script would not?

Any insights into debugging or resolving this kind of programmatic access issue would be greatly appreciated.

Jade Wilder · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-14 06:32:39Z

1

@oliverhaven This is typically caused by the site's firewall blocking the default Python requests header. Try adding a common browser User-Agent:

python

headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'}
requests.get('your_url', headers=headers)

This makes your request appear to come from a regular browser rather than a script. Let me know if this resolves the timeout issue.

answered Nov 14 at 6:32

Jade Wilder

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