I think the Huffington Post managers would be more worried if a real media website went down like the NYT. Where would they steal - sorry aggregate - their content from then!
NASA can be pronounced as a word and so can be treated like a noun, while BBC cant. Technically this should apply to NATO as well, but fuck it, that's the English language for you.
I did Comms Engineering. I found Maths/Electronics/Commns particularly useless on Wikipedia. I and my classmates had to hit the old fashioned books (rather large ones too) to get information.