diff --git a/gitfiti.py b/gitfiti.py
index eacd950cc..6f92d63bc 100755
--- a/gitfiti.py
+++ b/gitfiti.py
@@ -167,7 +167,12 @@ def load_images(img_names):
 def get_calendar(username, base_url='https://github.com/'):
     """retrieves the github commit calendar data for a username"""
     url = base_url + 'users/' + username + '/contributions_calendar_data'
-    page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
+    try:
+        page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
+    except (urllib2.HTTPError,urllib2.URLError) as e:
+        print "There was a problem fetching data from {0}".format(url)
+        print e
+        raise SystemExit
     return json.load(page)
 
 def max_commits(input):