Why do I receive a timeout error from Pythons requests module?

Per https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/quickstart/#timeouts, that is the expected behavior. As royhowie mentioned, wrap it in a try/except block
(e.g.:

try:
  requests.post(url, headers, timeout=10)
except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
  print "Timeout occurred"

)