I just spent the past hour trying to troubleshoot this error message I was getting from the requests package when communicating with the MailChimp API:

SSLError: [Errno 1] _ssl.c:510: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

I just provisioned a production server running Ubuntu 14.04 x64 for a new Django project and had been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why it was throwing this error when our stage server works perfectly. Finally I decided to do a pip freeze in the virtualenv to check for version differences and a package named certifi stood out and sure enough it was a different version.

I just rolled back the version for now to certifi==2015.4.28 and that fixed my issue.

GitHub issue: https://github.com/certifi/python-certifi/issues/26