The present invention discloses a method and an apparatus for protecting a tunnel, wherein the method comprises: setting a second protection group on two intermediate nodes of a first protection group; when a segment between the two intermediate nodes fails, adopting the second protection group to protect the tunnel. The present invention solves the problem in a relevant art that it is very difficult to configure multiple protection segments for one working segment and it might be limited by various conditions, such as network resources and the like; therefore, the utilization rate and the reliability of the network resources are improved.