Recent developments have pushed cryogenic phonon-based detectors to the eV energy scale, advancing searches for light dark matter and neutrino-nucleus scattering. Accessing this regime has revealed an unexpected spectral feature - an excess starting at a few hundred eV and rising steeply toward lower energies - that poses a major challenge for these experiments. In this talk, I will present recent progress and current efforts of the low-threshold cryogenic detector community to understand and mitigate this Low-Energy Excess background.
