Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of communications, and provide a communications method and apparatus, which can solve a problem in the prior art that, in order to save power, when a mobility management entity (MME) delays delivering a paging message or a UE uses a long discontinuous reception (DRX) period, an exception may occur in a serving gateway (SGW). The method includes: acquiring, by an MME, information of a UE (S101); determining, by the MME according to the information, whether the UE satisfies a first preset condition (S102); if the UE satisfies the first preset condition, generating, by the MME, a first indication, where the first indication is used for instructing an SGW to retain first data or discard first data, and the first data is downlink data of the UE (S103); and sending, by the MME, the first indication to the SGW.