diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.0.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.0.txt
index 9c6f5d3e0596d..f0bfd6a86abc3 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.0.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.0.txt
@@ -920,3 +920,4 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Bug in ``pd.melt()`` where passing a tuple value for ``value_vars`` caused a ``TypeError`` (:issue:`15348`)
 - Bug in ``.eval()`` which caused multiline evals to fail with local variables not on the first line (:issue:`15342`)
 - Bug in ``pd.read_msgpack`` which did not allow to load dataframe with an index of type ``CategoricalIndex`` (:issue:`15487`)
+- Use of ``np.finfo()`` during `import pandas` removed to mitigate deadlock on Python GIL misuse (:issue:`14641`)
diff --git a/pandas/core/indexing.py b/pandas/core/indexing.py
index 19b7771251da3..c80e8c34aa88f 100755
--- a/pandas/core/indexing.py
+++ b/pandas/core/indexing.py
@@ -1852,7 +1852,7 @@ def _convert_key(self, key, is_setter=False):
 
 
 # 32-bit floating point machine epsilon
-_eps = np.finfo('f4').eps
+_eps = 1.1920929e-07
 
 
 def length_of_indexer(indexer, target=None):