Slabbing failure with regularity of surrounding rock is a typical failure phenomenon in deep hard and brittle rock mass due to excavation activity, which poses a serious challenge to safely construct the underground tunnels. There are two critical problems in the research of slabbing failure, i.e. the formation mechanism of slabbing failure and its influencing factors, and the relationship between slabbing failure and rockburst. Remarkable achievements have been made in the slabbing failure by theoretical analysis, field tests, laboratory experiments and numerical simulation over the past decades. By summarizing the research progress related to these two critical problems, it is believed that the formation mechanism of slabbing failure is a complex problem involving various influencing factors. Based on the meso-mechanism of the slabbing failure, the key point to explore its formation mechanism is to establish different types of mechanical criterion and model. Slabbing failure and rockburst have strong correlation and essential connection. To further reveal characteristics of slabbing failure and the involved precursor information of rockburst is a critical and difficult problem to study the relationship between slabbing failure and rockburst.