Due to the increasing variety of information and services carried by optical networks, the survivability of network becomes an important problem in current research. The fault location of OTN is of great significance for studying the survivability of optical networks. Firstly, a three-channel network model is established and analyzing common alarm data, the fault monitoring points and common fault points are carried out. The artificial neural network is introduced into the fault location field of OTN and it is used to judge whether the possible fault point exists or not. But one of the obvious limitations of general neural networks is that they receive a fixedsize vector as input and produce a fixed-size vector as the output. Not only that, these models is even fixed for mapping operations (for example, the number of layers in the model). The difference between the recurrent neural network and general neural networks is that it can operate on the sequence. In spite of the fact that the gradient disappears and the gradient explodes still exist in the neural network, the method of gradient shearing or weight regularization is adopted to solve this problem, and choose the LSTM (long-short term memory networks) to locate the fault. The output uses the concept of membership degree of fuzzy theory to express the possible fault point with the probability from 0 to 1. Priority is given to the treatment of fault points with high probability. The concept of F-Measure is also introduced, and the positioning effect is measured by using location time, MSE and F-Measure. The experiment shows that both LSTM and BP neural network can locate the fault of optical transport network well, but the overall effect of LSTM is better. The localization time of LSTM is shorter than that of BP neural network, and the F1-score of LSTM can reach 0.961566888396156 after 45 iterations, which meets the accuracy and real-time requirements of fault location. Therefore, it has good application prospect and practical value to introduce neural network into the fault location field of optical transport network.