Disclosed in an embodiment of the present invention is a failure recovery method for a virtual network. The method comprises: determining, by a network device (for example, a transmission controller), that a failure occurs on a physical link in a physical network, wherein the physical link having the failure corresponds to at least one virtual link in the virtual network; mapping the at least one virtual link corresponding to the physical link having the failure to failure-free physical resources in the physical network, the failure-free physical resources satisfying a transmission bandwidth condition of each virtual link of the at least one virtual link. Via the above technical solution, failure recovery for a virtual network can be achieved; in addition, when the physical resources corresponding to the virtual network has a failure, the virtual network can rapidly recover from the failure, and the topology of the virtual network recovered from the failure is the same as that before the failure, thus improving user experience.