It’s even worse when the system isn’t business-critical: a reporting service, a manual intervention tool, something that quietly supports a process. When it fails, everyone is affected, but no one is accountable.
Ironically, these are often legacy systems that have been rock-solid for years — so reliable they’re forgotten… until they break.
For one particular occasion , once we took blame out of the equation (at least within the engineering team) and started doing Post Incident Reports, the incentives finally became clear for the business as we were able to compile a list of recurrent issues during every issue, calculate a financial loss and present it for inspection each and every time they either began a witch hunt for downtime or refused to allocate time to backlog. Small wins.
Be vocal and say "I will no longer respond when system XYZ goes down unless serious efforts are made to fix it."
If you get push back explain that you will also call the person telling you it's not important enough to fix each time it pages, and be willing to do so. What can they say?
Yes you will, or can. "At will" employment in the US.