The present invention provides a method for fast protection switching in multicast, where the method includes: determining a primary path and a secondary path to a source node, where the secondary path and the primary path have minimum tail coincidence; receiving, by using both the primary path and the secondary path, multicast traffic replicated by an upstream neighboring node, and replicating multicast traffic received by the primary path to a downstream neighboring node; and if the primary path is faulty, replicating multicast traffic received by the secondary path to the downstream neighboring node. In the present invention, primary and secondary paths can have minimum tail coincidence, which overcomes a problem that fault protection switching in a multicast network requires that primary and secondary paths existing from a routing node to a multicast source are completely separate in physical topology.