Electronic trading platform Tradeweb said on Tuesday that talk of a large erroneous trade of U.S. government securities on its system that sparked a sudden market sell-off is wrong.

U.S. government bond prices dropped suddenly in early trading, which led to speculation of an erroneous trade on the Tradeweb system.

Reports of a multibillion dollar customer trade error on Tradeweb this morning are completely false. Indeed, Tradeweb has a number of safeguards and warnings incorporated into its electronic markets to prevent 'fat-finger' errors of this type, the company said in a statement.

Tradeweb is a unit of Thomson Reuters.

At the height of the market sell-off, 30-year Treasury bond was down as much as 1-6/32 with a yield of 4.61 percent, which was within striking distance of a near eight-month high set in December.

Traders said the trade was as much as $6 billion.

The surprisingly large size of the long-dated bonds sold raised chatter that the trade was a clerical error, and analysts said it was intended to be significantly smaller.

There were a lot of rumors ... There may have been a big error trade, said Thomas Roth, executive director in U.S. government trading at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in New York.

The long bond last traded 19/32 lower in price for a yield of 4.57 percent.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Dan Grebler)