The present invention discloses a downlink interference management method, applied to interference coordination between a serving base station of a cell serving at least one first user equipment and a neighboring-cell base station of the cell, including: obtaining, by the serving base station, downlink interference overload information, where the downlink interference overload information is used to indicate an interfered-with transmission resource of the first user equipment; and sending, by the serving base station, the downlink interference overload information to the neighboring-cell base station, so that the neighboring-cell base station performs interference coordination on the transmission resource. The downlink interference overload information sent by the serving base station to the neighboring-cell base station may instruct the neighboring-cell base station to perform interference coordination on the interfered-with transmission resource.