Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a network congestion control method, where the method includes: sending, by a transmit end device, forward probe packets to a destination device at a preset initialized rate, where some or all of the forward probe packets arrive at the destination device after being rate-limited forwarded by using a reserved bandwidth of an egress port of an intermediate device in a network; receiving return probe packets returned by the destination device, where the return probe packets correspond to the probe packets received by the destination device; and determining a data packet sending rate based on the received return probe packets, and sending a data packet at the data packet sending rate.