On November 8, 2010 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collided the first stable beams of heavy ions (Pb on Pb) at the centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV/nucleon. The LHC worked exceedingly well during its one month of operation with heavy ions, delivering about 10 $\mu𝑏^{−1}$ of data, with peak luminosity reaching to $L_{O} = 2 × 10^{25}$ cm^-2 s^-1 towards the end of the run. Three experiments, ALICE, ATLAS and CMS, recorded their first heavy-ion data, which were analysed in a record time. The results of the multiplicity, flow, fluctuations and Bose–Einstein correlations indicate that the fireball formed in nuclear collisions at the LHC is hotter, lives longer, and expands to a larger size at freeze-out as compared to lower energies. We give an overview of these as well as new results on quarkonia and heavy flavour suppression, and jet energy loss.