From https://github.com/theelous3/asks/issues/95 specifically https://github.com/theelous3/asks/issues/95#issuecomment-435187332 The gzip module blows and isn't sophisticated enough to decompress streams. Drop it in favour of full zlib. https://docs.python.org/3/library/zlib.html#zlib.decompress https://stackoverflow.com/a/22311297