A failure detection mechanism provides enhancements to PIM-SM based fast re-route techniques. A network node upon detecting a loss of connection determines whether it can re-route multicast data traffic. If the network node does not have a failure-free secondary path, it can originate a notification packet and send it to the downstream parts of a multicast tree. The notification packet can trigger one or more downstream nodes to switch-over to redundant secondary paths to re-route the multicast data traffic.