Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of communications technologies, and disclose a method and an apparatus for recovering from a radio downlink failure. The method includes: monitoring a first radio link to determine whether a radio downlink failure occurs on the first radio link, where the first radio link is a currently connected radio link; if it is detected that the radio downlink failure occurs on the first radio link, starting a physical-layer-monitored automatic-recovery process for the first radio link and starting a Radio Link Control RRC connection re-setup process to set up a second radio link; and recovering from the radio downlink failure through either of the physical-layer-monitored automatic-recovery process and the RRC connection re-setup process.