Telstra shares open lower, falling as much as 3 per cent as the telco says it’s making “good progress” on resolving its outage. The Australian share market is down heavily in early trade.
A sell-off across technology and artificial intelligence (AI) stocks sent Wall Street’s tech index, the Nasdaq Composite, sharply lower.
See how the trading day unfolds on our blog.
Disclaimer: this blog is not intended as investment advice.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:24am
Market snapshot
- ASX 200: -1.4% to 8,684 points
- Australian dollar: -0.4% to 69.3 US cents
- Wall Street: Dow Jones (-0.3%), S&P 500 (-0.5%), Nasdaq Composite (-1.2%)
- Europe: FTSE (+0.1%), Stoxx 600 (-0.7%)
- Asia: Nikkei (-1.2%), KOSPI (-0.7%)
- Spot gold: -1.4% to $US4,105/ounce
- Oil (Brent crude): +2.8% to $US76.21/barrel
- Iron ore: +0.1% to $US98.15/tonne
- Bitcoin: -0.2% to $US63,552
Prices current around 10:25am AEST
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 1:16pm
New Zealand’s central bank hikes interest rates
New Zealand’s central bank raised its benchmark official cash rate by 25 basis points to 2.5% on Wednesday and made clear that further rate hikes are necessary to return inflation to target despite a still-fragile economic recovery.
The decision was in line with 22 of 28 economists polled by Reuters, who had forecast the Reserve Bank of New Zealand would hike rates by a quarter point.
The central bank has slashed rates by 325 basis points since August 2024 to support an economy struggling to gain traction as inflation receded.
However, the oil shock tied to the Iran war is expected to have pushed inflation significantly beyond the central bank’s target range of 1% to 3%, forcing policymakers to bring forward rate hikes despite an unsteady recovery.
“With inflation still above target and economic activity expected to strengthen, some further reduction in monetary stimulus is likely to be required to return inflation to the 2% target mid-point,” the RBNZ said in its accompanying Monetary Policy Review statement.
Markets are now almost fully pricing in another rate hike in October.
The central bank said that further cash rate decisions will depend on how incoming data, price-setting behaviour, and the strength of economic activity affect medium-term inflation pressures.
Reuters
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 12:49pm
BHP staff confirm historic strike action at Port Hedland
Hundreds of BHP workers look set to walk off the job at Port Hedland next week in what would be the Western Australian mining industry’s most significant industrial action for a quarter of a century.
It comes after talks between the mining giant and unions aimed at improving workers’ pay and conditions failed to reach a result.
The unions, which represent almost 400 workers at the mining giant’s Port Hedland operations, said they had given BHP the required five days’ notice to strike.
The dispute at the port, Australia’s largest export facility, stands to threaten $120 million a day in revenue for the company and $6.85m in royalty payments to the WA government, according to the latest available data.
Read the full story from ABC Pilbara reporter Kimberley Putland:
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 12:44pm
Telstra boss overseas, returning in coming days
As we reported earlier, Telstra CFO Michael Ackland gave a press conference in place of CEO Vicki Brady, who is on annual leave.
In a statement, a Telstra spokesperson said: “Vicki is overseas at the moment and will be returning in the coming days.”
“Our CFO Michael Ackland is Vicki’s delegate and is managing the issue,” they said.
“Vicki has been briefed and kept updated throughout the morning.
“We’re making good progress on restoring services to full capacity.”
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 12:28pm
South Melbourne market shops find workarounds
By Specialist Reporting Team’s Mary Lloyd
By Specialist Reporting Team’s Mary Lloyd
Shops throughout the bustling South Melbourne Markets had trouble taking payments this morning as the Telstra outage knocked out communication with their banks, but many found ways to work around the problem.
A pasta shop could not process sales from the time they opened at 7am this morning until about 8:30am.
Isabella Bailey, who works there, says they lost business to some regular customers who come to the market first thing to get their groceries.
But says many of their older customers still carry cash.
“A lot of people do prefer to pay cash because of the card surcharges,” she says.
They heard on the radio that Telstra was advising businesses to turn their EFTPOS terminals on and off to reconnect them.
That partly worked for the purveyors of pasta.
“One would work and the other wouldn’t,” Ms Bailey says.
A few aisles away, a health food store had a similar problem.
Moses Feldman, who owns a wholemarket food store, says they didn’t lose too many transactions because their customers found other ways to pay.
One left her goods, went for a massage and returned to complete her purchase. Others withdrew cash from a nearby ATM.
After 36 years in the business, Mr Feldman is stoic about the disruption.
“It’s upsetting. It’s annoying. But what do we do? It’s part of life,” he says.
The businessman remembers processing credit card transactions with a manual device that took an imprint of the card, which took an hour to reconcile each evening.
He says the current system is still more convenient than that and expects to endure more disruptions.
“It will happen many more times,” he says.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 12:14pm
WiseTech shares give back Tuesday’s gains after board changes
Any idea why Wisetech is getting hammered again ?
– Craig
Thanks for joining us Craig.
As you say, it’s not a good day on the market for WiseTech Global, the stock is down 7.1% at the moment.
It is a generally down day for the local share market, and the technology sector is leading the losses, so it was unlikely to be a positive session for the WiseTech.
But it of course comes off a bit of a recovery for the stock in recent days, including a 5.7% gain yesterday.
It follows Richard White stepping down as chair amid what he called the “unnecessary distraction” of media speculation that he is facing an AFP investigation.
Mr White will remain on the board as a director and in the executive team as chief innovation officer.
While investors appeared to take it as positive, not everyone views it that way, which may be contributing to the sell off this morning.
Morningstar analysts, which had previously noted they would see any threat to White’s leadership as a negative for the share price, issued a note late yesterday.
On the appointment of the independent chair, the analysts said “we view the transition as a negative given White’s much longer experience and his track record of expanding the company to where it is today”.
“However, we think White will still have substantial influence in the company, especially given his substantial shareholding as chief innovation officer.”
Morningstar lowered its fair value estimate for the stock “as we think White will be less effective following his stepping down as executive chair”.
“We think having more captains behind the steering wheel will lead to less certain endeavours being more intensely debated and ultimately compromised, resulting in lower revenue growth.”
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 11:50am
SpaceX debuts on Nasdaq 100 as Elon Musk loses trillionaire status
Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire.
His net worth has fallen to $US932 billion, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.
That’s after shares of the companies he manages, Tesla and SpaceX, fell by 4% and 6.8% overnight.
The latest development with SpaceX is that it has been admitted into the Nasdaq 100, a US stock index which tracks the performance of America’s biggest tech companies.
This means certain exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other major tech investment funds will have to passively buy shares of SpaceX to keep up with that US stock index.
The company debuted on Wall Street only a month ago, and its shares have dropped 7.1% since then.
So those who bought shares of SpaceX when it first listed, or when it hit a record high of $US201.80, in mid-June, will be nursing a loss.
But to borrow a saying from Mr Musk, if his company does end up “going to the moon” — metaphorically and perhaps literally — then those who are holding out for the long term may do alright.
But given it’s still an unprofitable company, it’s a high-risk bet.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 11:28am
Gold and tech stocks among the ASX’s worst performers
The Australian share market has recovered somewhat after the first hour of trading.
The ASX 200 was down 1.1% to 8,707 points by around 11:20am AEST. It’s an improvement over the almost 1.5% opening drop, at least.
Seven out of every 10 stocks are trading lower. So that’s most of them down, which means the sentiment is still deeply negative today.
Gold miners like Pantoro Gold (-3.7%) and Evolution Mining (-4.2%) are faring poorly after a steep fall in the precious metal’s spot price.
Concerns about the US and Iran’s longer-term peace negotiations breaking down as a result of the overnight hostilities — and shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz taking even longer to recover — led to a spike in oil prices.
Higher oil prices, if they persist, will lead to higher inflation — which will raise the odds of the Federal Reserve lifting US interest rates.
That, in turn, will strengthen the US dollar, which makes non-yielding assets like gold less attractive.
Tech stocks like WiseTech Global (-5.9%) are also down significantly as investors took profits after yesterday’s surge, which was due to Richard White stepping down as the company’s chairman.
The worst performer is IperionX, which plunged more than 16% after it announced plans to raise $US50 million by issuing new shares. That tends to dilute the value of shares for existing shareholders.
“Proceeds from the Public Offering will be used to continue the commercialisation and scale-up of certain of our titanium and metal alloy production technologies,” IperionX wrote in a statement to the ASX.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 11:18am
RBA chief economist speaking in Canberra
In some other news today, Reserve Bank assistant governor (economic) Sarah Hunter is delivering a speech in Canberra.
It’s titled: Understanding supply shocks and their implications for monetary policy.
She’s kicking off with an explanation of how the central bank uses interest rates to manage inflation and demand in the economy.
Dr Hunter described monetary policy as a “demand management tool”.
“We can’t use it to materially change the economy’s trend rate of productivity growth or maximum sustainable employment, and as a small open economy we are buffeted by changes in the global environment,” she said.
Dr Hunter says it’s important to highlight this as the RBA’s two mandates — low and stable inflation and full employment — go hand in hand and “there is no trade-off”.
“Low and stable inflation also supports sustainable growth as it allows households and businesses to plan and invest without worrying about inflation.
“But ultimately, structural drivers like demographics and productivity determine trend growth, and these trends don’t typically vary enough to drive short-run cycles.”
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:58am
Telstra’s CFO says outage was caused by a problem with its ‘nodes’
Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland said the problems with his company’s calls and data services were first detected in the early hours of this morning, around 4:30am AEST.
“So the issue is impacting a number of nodes within our network that keep time across the mobile network,” he said.
For more on that explanation, you can watch a snippet of his press conference here:
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Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:52am
Santos, Woodside and Ampol surge as renewed Middle East hostilities boost oil price
Many of today’s best-performing stocks are in the oil and gas industry.
Santos, Karoon Energy, Viva Energy, Woodside Energy, Beach Energy and Ampol shares are doing far better than other stocks on the Australian market today.
Oil prices spiked after a sharp escalation in Middle East tensions overnight — and if they stay high for longer, it will be good for the finances of those companies.
Brent crude futures are trading at $US75.95 per barrel, after it rose another 2.4% in the past hour.
This was after the US military launched a series of strikes against Iran, heightening concerns that its fragile ceasefire was faltering.
The strikes against Iran were in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial ships that were passing through the Strait of Hormuz, US Central Command said in a statement.
Maritime authorities have also raised the threat risk for vessels transiting the waterway to “severe.”
The US Treasury, meanwhile, revoked a temporary licence to Iran, which allowed the country to sell oil to the rest of the world.
While traffic through the strait has picked up in the past week, it remains spotty, ranging between one-third and one-fifth of its pre-war levels.
– with Reuters
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:31am
Telstra outage ‘big inconvenience’ for regional businesses
In Cooma, in the NSW Snowy Mountains, Marion Mason has been unable to call her clients for a construction cleaning job.
“We’ve just driven two and a half hours up here to go to work,” she said.
“It’s been a pretty big inconvenience.”
Tourists visiting the region for the school holidays are also navigating the connection loss.
“I actually didn’t know there was an outage until my wife rang me on my son’s phone who is with Optus,” said one holiday maker passing through the town.
“Just by pure chance we diversified.”
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:20am
Australian shares fall sharply, ASX opens 1.4pc lower
The Australian share market is off to a worse-than-expected start.
The ASX 200 was down 1.4% to 8,680 points by 10:20am AEST.
It seems local investors have been put off by the latest flare-up in Middle East hostilities and Wall Street’s tech sell-off.
Locally, today’s best-performing sector is energy (+3%) following a sharp rise in oil prices.
That, in turn, was after the US launched strikes against Iran this morning, which it says was in retaliation for Iran attacking three commercial ships around the Strait of Hormuz overnight.
Most sectors, however, are trading lower, with materials (-2.3%), technology (-1.3%) and financials (-1%) among the worst performers.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:14am
Telstra share price down 2.8pc in early trade
Telstra shares have fallen sharply after a nationwide telecommunications outage, which led to train networks in parts of NSW and Victoria being suspended.
The telco’s share price was down 2.8% to $4.93 by 10:13am AEST.
While the company scrambles to fix its network outage, Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland has confirmed its shares will not be placed in a trading halt,
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:14am
That’s a wrap on the Telstra CFO
And with that, the press conference with Telstra CFO Michael Ackland has wrapped up.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:12am
Telstra chief executive on annual leave
The Telstra CFO Michael Ackland is asked why he is giving the press conference instead of chief executive Vicki Brady.
Mr Ackland says she is on annual leave.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:10am
Nothing to suggest malicious activity: Telstra CFO
Telstra CFO Michael Ackland says: “At this stage, we have nothing to indicate malicious activity.”
“We’ve been in contact with all regulators and government agencies to that effect. We continue to investigate,” he tells the Melbourne press conference.
“We continue to remain curious and explore every avenue, but we have nothing on that.”
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:08am
Disruption intermittent but national: Telstra CFO
Mr Ackland described it as a “set of intermittent outages” and said it affected people nationally, regardless of their location in relation to the nodes.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:06am
We don’t yet know the root cause: Telstra CFO
Mr Ackland says the telco has not yet identified the root cause of the outage.
The nodes affected are located in Melbourne or Sydney “largely”, and a number have been restored.
He said to think of a node as a server, and they are located in Telstra-owned data centres.
Wed 8 Jul 2026 at 10:05am
Customers encouraged to use wi-fi or ‘try again’
Telstra CFO Michael Ackland says Telstra customers should try again if they experience issues, given they are intermittent.
He encouraged those who have wi-fi access to use that.
