Hormozgan knocked offline: 116 telecom towers lost in US strikes, repairs under way

On 18 July 2026, the director general of communications and information technology for Iran's Hormozgan province told state outlets that 116 telecommunication towers had been disabled in US strikes, taking landline, mobile and internet service down across the province's north. Operational crews were dispatched with replacement equipment to bring coverage back online, but the outage laid bare how a single piece of critical infrastructure, distributed across the country's most strategically sensitive coastline, can be neutralised in hours.

The two reported figures do not yet reconcile, and the discrepancy itself is the story. Iran's Tasnim News Agency, posting in English at 11:05 UTC, put the disabled-tower count at 116. Four hours later, at 15:08 local equivalent, Mehr News cited the provincial communications director general describing a "fixed phone and mobile internet disruption" in northern Hormozgan, without confirming the same total. Read together, the two dispatches describe the same event from inside the same emergency-response chain, but only one of them attaches a number large enough to suggest a province-wide communications blackout rather than a localised fault.

What Hormozgan actually lost

Hormozgan runs along Iran's southern coast, wrapping the Strait of Hormuz and the eastern reaches of the Persian Gulf. The province is the operational base for much of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, hosts the bulk of Iran's missile and drone test ranges, and contains the port of Bandar Abbas, the country's largest container terminal. A communications outage there is not a consumer-inconvenience story. It severs the connective tissue between Iranian military headquarters and forward positions in a province that fronts one of the world's most contested shipping lanes.

According to Mehr, the provincial communications director general described crews restoring service using replacement equipment after operational groups were dispatched. The framing, repeated across state media, is of a manageable technical fault: equipment damaged, equipment replaced, service returning. The speed of the response, and the explicit naming of operational groups on the ground, suggests Tehran is treating the restoration as a sovereign priority, not a provincial inconvenience.

Tasnim's figure of 116 towers, if confirmed, points to something more systemic. A province-wide tower count in Iran's southern coastal belt runs in the low thousands; losing 116 in a single strike package is a meaningful fraction of regional capacity, and concentrated disruption to landline plus mobile plus internet implies the strikes hit switching and backhaul nodes, not just antennae. Neither Tasnim nor Mehr identifies which equipment was struck, or whether fibre rings, satellite uplinks, or mobile switching centres were among the targets.

The damage tally Tehran wants the world to read

The two wire items sit inside a familiar pattern of Iranian crisis communication. State outlets publish a high damage figure through an English-language channel to reach foreign audiences, while the Persian-language service, citing the same directorate, emphasises the recovery effort. The effect is to put the cost of the strikes on the international record while preserving domestic confidence in the state's ability to restore services quickly.

There is no independent confirmation of the 116-tower figure in the available reporting. No Western wire, no UN agency, no third-party telecoms operator has yet verified the count. That absence is itself worth flagging: Iran's telecommunications infrastructure is opaque to outside observers by design, and the country has historically released damage tallies only through its own state-aligned channels. The number should be treated as an official Iranian claim pending independent corroboration, not as a verified casualty figure.

The competing framing is that this is a routine engineering response to storm damage or power failure, dressed up as strike-related. That reading is hard to sustain. Mehr explicitly attributes the disruption to the US strikes; Tasnim does the same. Iranian provincial communications officials do not, as a rule, blame US military action for routine outages, given the political cost of misattribution. The more plausible counter-reading is that the damage is real but smaller than the headline figure suggests, with the 116-tower total applying to the province's affected operational area rather than the entire province.

Connectivity as a military target

Telecommunications infrastructure has become a routine target in modern air campaigns, and the logic is familiar to anyone who watched the opening days of operations in Yugoslavia in 1999 or the strikes on Syrian command-and-control nodes in the 2010s. Severing an adversary's internal communications degrades its ability to coordinate air defence, move forces, and transmit battlefield telemetry. The strikes on Hormozgan, on the available evidence, appear designed to do exactly that: blind Iranian command in the province most exposed to US naval and air power.

The structural question this raises is whether targeting civilian-adjacent infrastructure, towers that also carry commercial mobile traffic and consumer internet, crosses a line the United States has previously tried to observe. The answer depends on which towers were struck and what they carried. Dual-use infrastructure, used by both military and civilian customers, is a longstanding target category, and US strike planners have consistently argued that dual-use status makes a target lawful. The Iranian counter-argument is straightforward: knocking a province's civilian communications offline is a collective punishment inflicted on people who did not author Tehran's regional posture.

What to watch next

The first signal of how bad the damage really is will come from Iranian mobile operators, MTN Irancell and MCI, both of which publish network-status pages and have done so during previous outages. The second signal will come from internet-monitoring services such as NetBlocks, which track Iranian connectivity at the network layer in near real time. A sustained drop in BGP route announcements from Hormozgan would corroborate the 116-tower figure; a partial, intermittent recovery would suggest a smaller footprint of damage.

The political signal will come from Tehran's choice of venue for its next press briefing. If Hormozgan's provincial directorate appears on state television within forty-eight hours to walk back or refine the 116-tower figure, the operational scope was narrower than the headline suggested. If the figure stands, and is joined by additional counts from neighbouring provinces, the strikes did more than disable towers; they put a question mark over Iran's ability to command its southern coastline at the moment US naval assets are most active in the Gulf.

Either way, the restoration crews that Mehr describes working through the afternoon of 18 July are not just refitting antennas. They are reassembling the nervous system of a province that sits on top of the strait through which a fifth of seaborne oil normally transits. Until that work is finished, every minute of outage is a minute Tehran cannot coordinate its southern military posture at full fidelity.

Desk note: Monexus treats Iranian state outlets as primary sources for events on Iranian soil, with explicit caveat. The 116-tower figure is an Iranian official claim, not an independently verified count, and the discrepancy with Mehr's framing of the same incident is noted in the body of the piece.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/tasnimnews_en
• https://t.me/mehrnews