Offshore wind farms have poor accessibility and bad operation conditions. Offshore wind turbines have high failure rate, long repair time and it is difficult to maintain. It will cause huge economic loss once wind turbines fail to shutdown. The history operating data of offshore and onshore wind turbines are counted and deeply analyzed, fault characteristics of key components in the offshore wind turbine are generalized. The electric faults in wind turbines and its influence on the system are analyzed. The research status of existing fault-tolerant operation in offshore wind turbines are summarized from two aspects of hardware and software fault tolerance respectively, fault-tolerant schemes of offshore wind turbines are concluded, and the application feasibility of existing fault-tolerant schemes is analyzed. The main problems of offshore wind power fault tolerance at the present stage are pointed out and the research focus in the future is prospected.