First of all this is not an issue, this is excepted behaviour. Yesterday (1/6/18) the Steemit Inc decommissioned obsolete steemd.steemit.com RPC node as they communicated few times before.
The new public API node api.steemit.com uses http/jsonrpc instead of RPC protocol and most popular libraries like steem-js, steem-python, radiator or dsteem are compatible out of the box.
If your application reports connection timeout errors, similar to below,
WARNING:urllib3.connectionpool:Retrying (Retry(total=15, connect=None, read=None, redirect=0, status=None)) after connection broken by 'ConnectTimeoutError(<urllib3.connection.VerifiedHTTPSConnection object at 0x7f0dde1439b0>, 'Connection to steemd.steemit.com timed out. (connect timeout=60)')': /
it means your application endpoint is still set to disabled node. The fix is very easy and all what you need to do is replace the old node steemd.steemit.com by the new one api.steemit.com.
For tools built on top of steem-python you can use steempy and set new default node,
$ steempy set nodes https://api.steemit.com
or change it directly in the code,
nodes = [
'https://api.steemit.com',
]
s = Steemd(nodes)
It's always good to define a few API servers and if you're looking for the list of available public API nodes please check my tool https://geo.steem.pl, or run curl geo.steem.pl in your terminal ;-)
If you think I can be a good witness, please vote for me.
Thank you!