January marked a big month for traffic to our site, with many of you eager to see some bad news (layoffs and network outages) but also good (new hires and new technologies to sell).

The biggest layoff news concerned AT&T, while CenturyLink was at the heart of the outage news.

Plantronics offered up a whiz-bang new product that stemmed from its massive Polycom acquisition, and Five9 hired a Cisco vet as its new CTO.

Those are just four of the dozen to crack our monthly recap of hot stories. Don’t like what you see here? You are in charge, as these are the most-read stories by you, our loyal reader, and those that you click through from our weekly newsletters. (Be sure to sign up for those here).

Which story was No. 1? Click through our gallery below to find out!

Missed the previous month’s top stories? Click here to see our most-read posts in December. And here’s where to find our countdown of the top 15 stories of 2018.

Follow executive editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.