ATLAS: Status and First Results

Recent results from the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider are presented. The experiment has been functioning with high efficiency since the start of LHC data-taking, at proton-proton centre-of-mass energies of 900 GeV and 2.36 TeV (2009) and 7 TeV (2010). This paper provides a brief overview of the highlights of recent detector performance and physics measurements.