A communications method and apparatus. The communications method includes: transmitting a first request to a network device through a first resource, where the first request is used to request beam failure recovery of a first cell or is used to request system information of the first cell, the first resource is a resource of a second cell, and the first cell and the second cell are serving cells of a same terminal; and receiving a first response corresponding to the first request from the network device. Therefore, when a terminal has a plurality of serving cells, the terminal may transmit a request across cells (or across carriers), to improve transmission reliability.