Abstract: In order to study on the different failure modes of glass and ceramic and that whether there is a phenomena of failure wave in ceramic, a numerical simulation work was carried out, from which the different dynamic responses of ceramic and glass under impact loading were obtained, and the main factors in the meso-structure caused the different responds of two materials were given out and analyzed. The explanations were presented that why the recompression signal characterizing the failure wave was not observed in ceramic at the same conditions with the glass experiments, which indicated that the failure wave existed. The analyzed results show that, comparing with the glass existing failure wave, there is not the failure wave phenomena in ceramic because of the large size cracks in the meso-structure, which grows at a high velocity and makes the materials damage with little time decay after the impact loading, so it is too hard to observe the failure wave in the ceramic experiments.