The present invention discloses a path switching method and apparatus in a network comprising at least a first path and a second path. For an incoming traffic flow, it is determined that any of tunnels on the first path of all levels into which the incoming traffic flow is multiplexed is of a failure status. The incoming traffic flow is then forwarded via the second path. Herein, for the first path, one or more traffic flows are multiplexed into a tunnel, and one or more higher level tunnels are multiplexed into a lower level tunnel.