But on Monday, city councillors voted to call off their regular meeting because of an outage of the software that facilitates the provision of simultaneous translation in French or English.

"It was very disappointing," Mayor Kate Rogers said immediately after councillors voted to postpone the meeting until next Monday evening.

Rogers said the city uses software by a company called eScribe to live stream its meetings online, and to allow interpreters to listen to the meeting and translate what's being said, typically from English to French.

Documents relevant to the meeting agenda are also uploaded online through the software, which can then be accessed by councillors and the public.

However, the software stopped working at about 6:30 p.m. with no clear timeline for when it would be up again, Rogers said.

"We had figured out how we could do the meeting with [physical] documents, but we still couldn't reconcile how we could get the meeting, you know, through the feed and and out into the public."

Fredericton Mayor Kate Rogers says the translation service is necessary to serve the city's French-speaking residents and to meet requirements of the Official Languages Act. (Aidan Cox/CBC)

Rogers said the meeting would have still been available to viewers through cable television, but the online live feed would have been unavailable, and the city would have violated its Official Languages Act requirement to provide simultaneous translation in French.

"So it is a requirement that we do it, and again, we're also very committed to doing it because of the number of francophone residents that we have in Fredericton."

CBC News emailed eScribe on Monday night requesting an interview about what happened to its software but did not receive a response before deadline.

A unique reason to cancel meeting

The City of Fredericton has been using eScribe's software for its live feed of the meeting and providing simultaneous translation since 2013, said Amy Cronkhite, the city's assistant clerk.

Assistant city clerk Amy Cronkhite says council meetings have had to be cancelled in the past because of flooding and a snowstorm. (Aidan Cox/CBC)

And while it's the first time the technology's failure has prompted the cancellation of a meeting, other circumstances have forced the postponement of meetings.

"Once we had 80 centimetres [of snow] and they shut it down," Cronkhite said.

"And we had a flood where you couldn't get into city hall."