Embodiments of the present disclosure disclose a method and an apparatus for restoring a network device to factory defaults, and a network device, and relate to the field of configuration management technologies. A NETCONF server determines that the network device needs to be restored to the factory defaults; the NETCONF server replaces data in a startup configuration datastore and a running configuration datastore in the NETCONF server with factory defaults data in a factory defaults datastore, where the factory defaults datastore is dedicated to storing the factory defaults data of the network device. The NETCONF server delivers the data in the running configuration datastore after replacement to a plurality of service modules. Then, the plurality of service modules performs a validation operation based on the data delivered by the NETCONF server.