I was just reading Making Work Visible by Dominica Degrandis and one quote just made so much clear to me.

Businesses frequently prioritize new feature releases over fixing technical debt. They choose to work on revenue-generating work instead of revenue-protection work.

We often have difficultly in voicing why we need to spend time on broken or fragile things (often referred to as technical debt). In the IT space, this is often because we don’t directly connect the work we are doing to the value stream. We tend to think of our work in isolation and, in return, so does the rest of the company. However, our technical debt is a business risk and working on it is revenue-protection work.

You want to get some attention on that troublesome service to get some cycles to fix it? Find a way to show how an outage or service degradation will impact something customer facing (perhaps jepordizing SLAs or sales efforts).